Related papers: Designing Digital Voting Systems for Citizens: Ach…
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 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…
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…
Local and federal agencies are rapidly adopting AI systems to augment or automate critical decisions, efficiently use resources, and improve public service delivery. AI systems are being used to support tasks associated with urban planning,…
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…
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…
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.…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is already well established in Scotland in the form of community led grant-making yet has recently transformed from a grass-roots activity to a mainstream process or embedded 'policy instrument'. An integral…
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…
Trust and transparency in civic decision-making processes, like neighborhood planning, are eroding as community members frequently report sending feedback "into a void" without understanding how, or whether, their input influences outcomes.…
Participatory design initiatives, especially within the realm of digital civics, are often integrated and co-developed with the very citizens and communities they intend to assist. Digital civics research aims to create positive social…
Digital democracy and new forms for direct digital participation in policy making gain unprecedented momentum. This is particularly the case for preferential voting methods and decision-support systems designed to promote fairer, more…
The Web Bulletin Board (WBB) is a key component of verifiable election systems. It is used in the context of election verification to publish evidence of voting and tallying that voters and officials can check, and where challenges can be…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
This report first provides a brief review of various forms of dialogue-based participation, e.g., Citizen Assembly, Citizen Lottery, Citizen Jury, Deliberative Polling, and Participatory Budgeting. Challenges associated with these…
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 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…