Related papers: Welfare vs. Representation in Participatory Budget…
The legitimacy of bottom-up democratic processes for the distribution of public funds by policy-makers is challenging and complex. Participatory budgeting is such a process, where voting outcomes may not always be fair or inclusive.…
In participatory budgeting (PB), voters decide through voting which subset of projects to fund within a given budget. Proportionality in the context of PB is crucial to ensure equal treatment of all groups of voters. However, pure…
We introduce a family of normative principles to assess fairness in the context of participatory budgeting. These principles are based on the fundamental idea that budget allocations should be fair in terms of the resources invested into…
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…
In pursuit of participatory budgeting (PB) outcomes with broader fairness guarantees, we initiate the study of lotteries over discrete PB outcomes. As the projects have heterogeneous costs, the amount spent may not be equal ex ante and ex…
Participatory budgeting is a method of collectively understanding and addressing spending priorities where citizens vote on how a budget is spent, it is regularly run to improve the fairness of the distribution of public funds.…
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 study multiwinner elections with approval-based preferences. An instance of a multiwinner election consists of a set of alternatives, a population of voters---each voter approves a subset of alternatives, and the desired committee size…
Participatory budgeting, as a paradigm for democratic innovations, engages citizens in the distribution of a public budget to projects, which they propose and vote for implementation. So far, voting algorithms have been proposed and studied…
Participatory budgeting is a democratic approach to deciding the funding of public projects, which has been adopted in many cities across the world. We present a survey of research on participatory budgeting emerging from the computational…
We initiate the study of voting rules for participatory budgeting using the so-called epistemic approach, where one interprets votes as noisy reflections of some ground truth regarding the objectively best set of projects to fund. Using…
We study ways of evaluating the performance of losing projects in participatory budgeting (PB) elections by seeking actions that would have led to their victory. We focus on lowering the projects' costs, obtaining additional approvals for…
Participatory budgeting (PB) has been widely adopted and has attracted significant research efforts; however, there is a lack of mechanisms for PB which elicit project interactions, such as substitution and complementarity, from voters.…
We study budget aggregation under $\ell_1$-utilities, a model for collective decision making in which agents with heterogeneous preferences must allocate a public budget across a set of alternatives. Each agent reports their preferred…
The ability to measure the satisfaction of (groups of) voters is a crucial prerequisite for formulating proportionality axioms in approval-based participatory budgeting elections. Two common - but very different - ways to measure the…
Approval voting is widely used for making multi-winner voting decisions. The canonical rule (also called Approval Voting) used in the setting aims to maximize social welfare by selecting candidates with the highest number of approvals. We…
To choose a suitable multiwinner voting rule is a hard and ambiguous task. Depending on the context, it varies widely what constitutes the choice of an ``optimal'' subset of alternatives. In this paper, we provide a quantitative analysis of…
In participatory budgeting we are given a set of projects---each with a cost, an available budget, and a set of voters who in some form express their preferences over the projects. The goal is to select---based on voter preferences---a…
In multiwinner approval voting, the goal is to select $k$-member committees based on voters' approval ballots. A well-studied concept of proportionality in this context is the justified representation (JR) axiom, which demands that no large…
Participatory budgeting refers to the practice of allocating public resources by collecting and aggregating individual preferences. Most existing studies in this field often assume an additive utility function, where each individual holds a…