Related papers: Proportionally Representative Participatory Budget…
Despite extensive theoretical research on proportionality in approval-based multiwinner voting, its impact on which committees and candidates can be selected in practice remains poorly understood. We address this gap by (i) analyzing the…
This paper introduces Propose or Vote (PoV), a democratic procedure for collective decision-making and elections that does not rely on a central mechanism designer. In the first stage, members of a polity choose whether to become…
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…
We present a strategy-proof public goods budgeting mechanism where agents determine both the total volume of expanses and the specific allocation. It is constructed as a modification of VCG to a less typical environment, namely where we do…
We address the question of aggregating the preferences of voters in the context of participatory budgeting. We scrutinize the voting method currently used in practice, underline its drawbacks, and introduce a novel scheme tailored to this…
In this short note, we describe an approval-based committee selection rule that admits a polynomial-time algorithm and satisfies the Extended Justified Representation (EJR) axiom. This rule is based on approximately maximizing the PAV…
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 study the problem of fair sequential decision making given voter preferences. In each round, a decision rule must choose a decision from a set of alternatives where each voter reports which of these alternatives they approve. Instead of…
Citizen-focused democratic processes where participants deliberate on alternatives and then vote to make the final decision are increasingly popular today. While the computational social choice literature has extensively investigated voting…
When selecting committees based on preferences of voters, a variety of different criteria can be considered. Two natural objectives are maximizing the utilitarian welfare (the sum of voters' utilities) and coverage (the number of…
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…
Voting methods are instrumental design elements of democracies. Citizens use them to express and aggregate their preferences to reach a collective decision. However, voting outcomes can be as sensitive to voting rules as they are to…
Population protocols are a relatively novel computational model in which very resource-limited anonymous agents interact in pairs with the goal of computing predicates. We consider the probabilistic version of this model, which naturally…
While proportionality is frequently named as a desirable property of voting rules, its interpretation in multiwinner voting differs significantly from that in apportionment. We aim to bridge these two distinct notions of proportionality by…
The study of proportionality in multiwinner voting with approval ballots has received much attention in recent years. Typically, proportionality is captured by variants of the Justified Representation axiom, which say that cohesive groups…
In the apportionment problem, a fixed number of seats must be distributed among parties in proportion to the number of voters supporting each party. We study a generalization of this setting, in which voters can support multiple parties by…
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…
We initiate the study of the proportionality degree for participatory budgeting, with a particular focus on two popular methods: the Method of Equal Shares (MES) and Phragmen's Sequential Rule. Among other results, we derive tight bounds…
We consider the participatory budgeting problem where each of $n$ voters specifies additive utilities over $m$ candidate projects with given sizes, and the goal is to choose a subset of projects (i.e., a committee) with total size at most…
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…