Related papers: What Should We Optimize in Participatory Budgeting…
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 study a temporal voting model where voters have dynamic preferences over a set of public chores -- projects that benefit society, but impose individual costs on those affected by their implementation. We investigate the computational…
We consider an agent community wishing to decide on several binary issues by means of issue-by-issue majority voting. For each issue and each agent, one of the two options is better than the other. However, some of the agents may be…
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…
The challenging task of embedding innovative participatory processes and technologies within local government often falls upon local council officers. Using qualitative data collection and analysis, we investigate the ongoing work of…
How should we decide which fairness criteria or definitions to adopt in machine learning systems? To answer this question, we must study the fairness preferences of actual users of machine learning systems. Stringent parity constraints on…
Sortition is a political system in which decisions are made by panels of randomly selected citizens. The process for selecting a sortition panel is traditionally thought of as uniform sampling without replacement, which has strong fairness…
In recent years, research in Participatory Budgeting (PB) has put a greater emphasis on rules satisfying notions of fairness and proportionality, with the Method of Equal Shares (MES) being a prominent example. However, proportionality can…
We consider a voting model, where a number of candidates need to be selected subject to certain feasibility constraints. The model generalises committee elections (where there is a single constraint on the number of candidates that need to…
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 consider a model where a subset of candidates must be selected based on voter preferences, subject to general constraints that specify which subsets are feasible. This model generalizes committee elections with diversity constraints,…
This paper proposes a voting process in which voters allocate fractional votes to their expected utility in different domains: over proposals, other participants, and sets containing proposals and participants. This approach allows for a…
We study a budget aggregation setting where voters express their preferred allocation of a fixed budget over a set of alternatives, and a mechanism aggregates these preferences into a single output allocation. Motivated by scenarios in…
Understanding citizens' values in participatory systems is crucial for citizen-centric policy-making. We envision a hybrid participatory system where participants make choices and provide motivations for those choices, and AI agents…
Multi-winner voting is the process of selecting a fixed-size set of representative candidates based on voters' preferences. It occurs in applications ranging from politics (parliamentary elections) to the design of modern computer…
The relationship of policy choice by majority voting and by maximization of utilitarian welfare has long been discussed. I consider choice between a status quo and a proposed policy when persons have interpersonally comparable cardinal…
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…
We investigate the potential of deliberation to create consensus among fully-informed citizens. Our approach relies on two cognitive assumptions: i. citizens need a thinking frame (or perspective) to consider an issue; and ii. citizens…
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…
Reasoning about uncertainty is vital in many real-life autonomous systems. However, current state-of-the-art planning algorithms cannot either reason about uncertainty explicitly, or do so with a high computational burden. Here, we focus on…