Related papers: Consensus-based Participatory Budgeting for Legiti…
In this paper, we study the problem of Participatory Budgeting (PB) with approval ballots, inspired by Multi-Winner Voting schemes. We present generalized preference aggregation methods for participatory budgeting, especially for finding…
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…
Reaching some form of consensus is often necessary for autonomous agents that want to coordinate their actions or otherwise engage in joint activities. One way to reach a consensus is by aggregating individual information, such as…
Committee decisions are complicated by a deadline, e.g., the next start of a budget, or the beginning of a semester. In committee hiring decisions, it may be that if no candidate is supported by a strong majority, the default is to hire no…
Cumulative and quadratic voting are two distributional voting methods that are expressive, promoting fairness and inclusion, particularly in the realm of participatory budgeting. Despite these benefits, graphical voter interfaces for…
Social consensus is important for society. Sometimes the success of society depends on a consensus (e.g. the decision to pay taxes or to commit to the constitution). Examples for continuous opinion dynamics are discussions about tax rates…
Even though it is unrealistic to expect citizens to pinpoint the policy implementation that they prefer from the set of alternatives, it is still possible to infer such information through an exercise of ranking the importance of policy…
We formalize a framework for coordinating funding and selecting projects, the costs of which are shared among agents with quasi-linear utility functions and individual budgets. Our model contains the classical discrete participatory…
We study the complexity of candidate control in participatory budgeting elections. The goal of constructive candidate control is to ensure that a given candidate wins by either adding or deleting candidates from the election (in the…
In this paper, we investigate deliberation procedures that invite citizens with contextual opinions to explore alternative thinking frames. Contextuality is captured in a simple quantum cognitive model. We show how disagreeing citizens…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly expected to handle complex decision-making tasks, yet their ability to perform structured resource allocation remains underexplored. Evaluating their reasoning is also difficult due to data…
Public policies that supply public goods, especially those involve collaboration by limiting individual liberty, always give rise to controversies over governance legitimacy. Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) methods are appropriate…
Reaching consensus in urban planning is a complex process often hindered by prolonged negotiations, trade-offs, power dynamics, and competing stakeholder interests, resulting in inefficiencies and inequities. Advances in large language…
Consensus formation is pivotal in multi-agent systems (MAS), balancing collective coherence with individual diversity. Conventional LLM-based MAS primarily rely on explicit coordination, e.g., prompts or voting, risking premature…
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…
We design two mechanisms that ensure that the majority preferred option wins in all equilibria. The first one is a simultaneous game where agents choose other agents to cooperate with on top of the vote for an alternative, thus overcoming…
Reaching consensus is key to multi-agent coordination. To accomplish a cooperative task, agents need to coherently select optimal joint actions to maximize the team reward. However, current cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning…
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…
We study the robustness of approval-based participatory budgeting (PB) rules to random noise in the votes. Our contributions are twofold. First, we study the computational complexity of the #Flip-Bribery problem, where given a PB instance…
During deliberation processes, mediators and facilitators typically need to select a small and representative set of opinions later used to produce digestible reports for stakeholders. In online deliberation platforms, algorithmic selection…