Related papers: A Flexible Design for Funding Public Goods
Market-based mechanisms such as auctions are being studied as an appropriate means for resource allocation in distributed and mulitagent decision problems. When agents value resources in combination rather than in isolation, they must often…
Participatory Budgeting (PB) has evolved into a key democratic instrument for resource allocation in cities. Enabled by digital platforms, cities now have the opportunity to let citizens directly propose and vote on urban projects, using…
Participatory budgeting is a democratic innovation that empowers citizens to propose and vote on public investment projects. While researchers in computer science focused on improving the voting phase of this process, in this work we aim to…
This paper introduces a strategic planning tool for master-planned communities designed specifically to quantify residents' subjective preferences about large investments in amenities and infrastructure projects. Drawing on data obtained…
We study a generalization of the standard approval-based model of participatory budgeting (PB), in which voters are providing approval ballots over a set of predefined projects and -- in addition to a global budget limit, there are several…
The budget is the key means for effecting policy in democracies, yet its preparation is typically an excluding, opaque, and arcane process. We aim to rectify this by providing for the democratic creation of complete budgets --- for…
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…
We discuss the issue of distributed and cooperative decision-making in a network game of public service location. Each node of the network can choose to be a provider of service which is accessible to the provider itself and also to all the…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds promise as a technology that can be used to improve government and economic policy-making. This paper proposes a new research agenda towards this end by introducing Social Environment Design, a general…
Aiming to support a cross-sector and cross-border eGovernance paradigm for sharing common public services, this paper introduces an AI-enhanced solution that enables beneficiaries to participate in a decenntralized network for effective big…
Cooperative behavior among unrelated individuals in human and animal societies represents a most intriguing puzzle to scientists in various disciplines. Here we present a simple yet effective mechanism promoting cooperation under full…
A public decision-making problem consists of a set of issues, each with multiple possible alternatives, and a set of competing agents, each with a preferred alternative for each issue. We study adaptations of market economies to this…
We study a participatory budgeting problem of aggregating the preferences of agents and dividing a budget over the projects. A budget division solution is a probability distribution over the projects. The main purpose of our study concerns…
Existing attempts at utility computing revolve around two approaches. The first consists of proprietary solutions involving renting time on dedicated utility computing machines. The second requires the use of heavy, monolithic applications…
Many societal decision problems lie in high-dimensional continuous spaces not amenable to the voting techniques common for their discrete or single-dimensional counterparts. These problems are typically discretized before running an…
Many collective decision-making settings feature a strategic tension between agents acting out of individual self-interest and promoting a common good. These include wearing face masks during a pandemic, voting, and vaccination. Networked…
This paper investigates the distribution of public school expenditures across U.S. school districts using a bayesian maximum entropy model. Covering the period 2000-2016, I explore how inter-jurisdictional competition and household choice…
In large scale collective decision making, social choice is a normative study of how one ought to design a protocol for reaching consensus. However, in instances where the underlying decision space is too large or complex for ordinal…
Consider the following collective choice problem: a group of budget constrained agents must choose one of several alternatives. Is there a budget balanced mechanism that: i) does not depend on the specific characteristics of the group, ii)…
We study the problem of designing revenue-maximizing auctions for allocating multiple goods to flexible consumers. In our model, each consumer is interested in a subset of goods known as its flexibility set and wants to consume one good…