Related papers: Proportionally Representative Participatory Budget…
Platforms for online civic participation rely heavily on methods for condensing thousands of comments into a relevant handful, based on whether participants agree or disagree with them. These methods should guarantee fair representation of…
Conventional automated decision-support systems often prioritize predictive accuracy, overlooking the complexities of real-world settings where stakeholders' preferences may diverge or conflict. This can lead to outcomes that disadvantage…
Participatory budgeting is a popular method to engage residents in budgeting decisions by local governments. The Stanford Participatory Budgeting platform is an online platform that has been used to engage residents in more than 150…
We study the complexity of candidate control in participatory budgeting elections. The goal of constructive candidate control is to ensure that a given candidate wins by either adding or deleting candidates from the election (in the…
We define and study a general framework for approval-based budgeting methods and compare certain methods within this framework by their axiomatic and computational properties. Furthermore, we visualize their behavior on certain Euclidean…
Proportional representation (PR) is a fundamental principle of many democracies world-wide which employ PR-based voting rules to elect their representatives. The normative properties of these voting rules however, are often only understood…
Using data from 35 Participatory Budgeting instances in Amsterdam, we empirically compare two different Participatory Budgeting rules: the greedy cost welfare rule and the Method of Equal Shares. We quantify how proportional, equal and fair…
In participatory budgeting, communities collectively decide on the allocation of public tax dollars for local public projects. In this work, we consider the question of fairly aggregating the preferences of community members to determine an…
Social choice theory is the study of preference aggregation across a population, used both in mechanism design for human agents and in the democratic alignment of language models. In this study, we propose the representative social choice…
We consider elections where the voters come one at a time, in a streaming fashion, and devise space-efficient algorithms which identify an approximate winning committee with respect to common multiwinner proportional representation voting…
This research examines the role of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in enhancing citizen engagement in participatory budgeting. In response to challenges like declining civic participation and increased societal polarization, the…
Citizens' assemblies are an increasingly influential form of deliberative democracy, where randomly selected people discuss policy questions. The legitimacy of these assemblies hinges on their representation of the broader population, but…
Emerging methods for participatory algorithm design have proposed collecting and aggregating individual stakeholder preferences to create algorithmic systems that account for those stakeholders' values. Using algorithmic student assignment…
Public confidence in democratic institutions has declined across many OECD countries over recent decades, while political participation and policy influence remain unevenly distributed across socioeconomic groups. Concurrently, democratic…
Crowdsensing, also known as participatory sensing, is a method of data collection that involves gathering information from a large number of common people (or individuals), often using mobile devices or other personal technologies. This…
We formalize a framework for coordinating funding and selecting projects, the costs of which are shared among agents with quasi-linear utility functions and individual budgets. Our model contains the classical discrete participatory…
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…
Public funding processes demand fairness, learning, and outcomes that participants can understand. We introduce Komitee Equal Shares, a priceable virtual-budget allocation framework that integrates two signals: in voter mode, participants…
We study a class of elections in which the input format is trichotomous and allows voters to elicit their negative feelings explicitly. In particular, we study multiwinner elections with a special proclivity to elect proportionally…
The mathematical study of voting, social choice theory, has traditionally only been applicable to choices among a few predetermined alternatives, but not to open-ended decisions such as collectively selecting a textual statement. We…