Related papers: Consensus-based Participatory Budgeting for Legiti…

Judgment aggregation problems form a class of collective decision-making problems represented in an abstract way, subsuming some well known problems such as voting. A collective decision can be reached in many ways, but a direct one-step…

We consider multi-agent argumentation, where each agent's view of the arguments is encoded as an argumentation framework (AF). Then we study deliberative processes than can occur on this basis. We think of a deliberative process as taking…

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…

Platforms for online civic participation rely heavily on methods for condensing thousands of comments into a relevant handful, based on whether participants agree or disagree with them. These methods should guarantee fair representation of…

We study a model of consensus decision making, in which a finite group of Bayesian agents has to choose between one of two courses of action. Each member of the group has a private and independent signal at his or her disposal, giving some…

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…

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…

Much of the success of multi-agent debates depends on carefully choosing the right parameters. The decision-making protocol stands out as it can highly impact final model answers, depending on how decisions are reached. Systematic…

Participatory budgeting (PB) is a form of citizen participation that allows citizens to decide how public funds are spent. Through an election, citizens express their preferences on various projects (spending proposals). A voting mechanism…

We provide a library of participatory budgeting data (Pabulib) and open source tools (Pabutools and Pabustats) for analysing this data. We analyse how the results of participatory budgeting elections would change if a different selection…

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…

This research examines the role of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in enhancing citizen engagement in participatory budgeting. In response to challenges like declining civic participation and increased societal polarization, the…

The level of autonomy is increasing in systems spanning multiple domains, but these systems still experience failures. One way to mitigate the risk of failures is to integrate human oversight of the autonomous systems and rely on the human…

Multi-agent systems have demonstrated exceptional performance in downstream tasks beyond diverse single agent baselines. A growing body of work has explored ways to improve their reasoning and collaboration, from vote, debate, to complex…

In approval-based multiwinner voting, voters express approval preferences over a set of candidates, and the goal is to return a winning committee. This model captures a broad range of subset selection problems under preferences. Prior work…

The aim of this paper is to introduce models and algorithms for the Participatory Budgeting problem when projects can interact with each other. In this problem, the objective is to select a set of projects that fits in a given budget.…

We study voting rules for participatory budgeting, where a group of voters collectively decides which projects should be funded using a common budget. We allow the projects to have arbitrary costs, and the voters to have arbitrary additive…

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…

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…

Are there voting methods which (i) give everyone, including minorities, an equal share of effective power even if voters act strategically, (ii) promote consensus rather than polarization and inequality, and (iii) do not favour the status…