Related papers: A Participatory Democratic Budgeting Algorithm

Are there voting methods which (i) give everyone, including minorities, an equal share of effective power even if voters act strategically, (ii) promote consensus rather than polarization and inequality, and (iii) do not favour the status…

Elections are the central institution of democratic processes, and often the elected body -- in either public or private governance -- is a committee of individuals. To ensure the legitimacy of elected bodies, the electoral processes should…

An important aspect of AI design and ethics is to create systems that reflect aggregate preferences of the society. To this end, the techniques of social choice theory are often utilized. We propose a new social choice function motivated by…

We study the voting problem with two alternatives where voters' preferences depend on a not-directly-observable state variable. While equilibria in the one-round voting mechanisms lead to a good decision, they are usually hard to compute…

Participatory budgeting (PB) has attracted much attention in recent times due to its wide applicability in social choice settings. In this paper, we consider indivisible PB which involves allocating an available, limited budget to a set of…

We consider a social choice problem where only a small number of people out of a large population are sufficiently available or motivated to vote. A common solution to increase participation is to allow voters use a proxy, that is, transfer…

I study the optimal voting mechanism for a committee that must decide whether to enact or block a policy of unknown benefit. Information can come both from committee members who can acquire it at cost, and a strategic lobbyist who wishes…

Democratic processes increasingly aim to integrate large-scale voting with face-to-face deliberation, addressing the challenge of reconciling individual preferences with collective decision-making. This work introduces new methods that use…

We study low sample complexity mechanisms in participatory budgeting (PB), where each voter votes for a preferred allocation of funds to various projects, subject to project costs and total spending constraints. We analyze the distortion…

This position paper argues that effectively "democratizing AI" requires democratic governance and alignment of AI, and that this is particularly valuable for decisions with systemic societal impacts. Initial steps -- such as Meta's…

Polarization is a major concern for a well-functioning society. Often, mass polarization of a society is driven by polarizing political representation, even when the latter is easily preventable. The existing computational social choice…

We present a new model of collective decision making that captures important crowd-funding and donor coordination scenarios. In the setting, there is a set of projects (each with its own cost) and a set of agents (that have their budgets as…

A key task in certain democratic processes is to produce a concise slate of statements that proportionally represents the full spectrum of user opinions. This task is similar to committee elections, but unlike traditional settings, the…

This report first provides a brief review of various forms of dialogue-based participation, e.g., Citizen Assembly, Citizen Lottery, Citizen Jury, Deliberative Polling, and Participatory Budgeting. Challenges associated with these…

Elections for public offices in democratic nations are large-scale examples of collective decision-making. As a complex system with a multitude of interactions among agents, we can anticipate that universal macroscopic patterns could emerge…

We focus on the strategyproofness of voting systems where voters must choose a number of options among several possibilities. These systems include those that are used for Participatory Budgeting, where we organize an election to determine…

In citizens' assemblies, a group of constituents is randomly selected to weigh in on policy issues. We study a two-stage sampling problem faced by practitioners in countries such as Germany, in which constituents' contact information is…

Strategic manipulation of elections is typically studied in the context of promoting individual candidates. In parliamentary elections, however, the focus shifts: voters may care more about the overall governing coalition than the…

Permissionless-consensus-based Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) are the prevailing paradigm for participant-governed digital organisations. As participants have verified resources but no trusted identities, this ecosystem is…

In collective decision making, where a voting rule is used to take a collective decision among a group of agents, manipulation by one or more agents is usually considered negative behavior to be avoided, or at least to be made…