Related papers: Participatory Budgeting: Data, Tools, and Analysis
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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.…
Budget aggregation is a process in which citizens vote by declaring their individual ideal budget allocation, and a pre-determined rule aggregates all votes into a single outcome. Recent theoretical work has proposed various aggregation…
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 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…
We consider a participatory budgeting problem in which each voter submits a proposal for how to divide a single divisible resource (such as money or time) among several possible alternatives (such as public projects or activities) and these…
We present theoretical and empirical results demonstrating the usefulness of voting rules for participatory democracies. We first give algorithms which efficiently elicit \epsilon-approximations to two prominent voting rules: the Borda rule…
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…
Two prominent objectives in social choice are utilitarian - maximizing the sum of agents' utilities, and leximin - maximizing the smallest agent's utility, then the second-smallest, etc. Utilitarianism is typically computationally easier to…
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 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…
Election data represent a precious source of information to study human behavior at a large scale. In proportional elections with open lists, the number of votes received by a candidate, rescaled by the average performance of all…