Related papers: Rank, Pack, or Approve: Voting Methods in Particip…
In stochastic combinatorial optimization, algorithms differ in their adaptivity: whether or not they query realized randomness and adapt to it. Dean et al. (FOCS '04) formalize the adaptivity gap, which compares the performance of fully…
We consider the participatory budgeting problem where each of $n$ voters specifies additive utilities over $m$ candidate projects with given sizes, and the goal is to choose a subset of projects (i.e., a committee) with total size at most…
Imagine you are a computer scientist who enjoys attending conferences or workshops within the year. Sadly, your travel budget is limited, so you must select a subset of events you can travel to. When you are aware of all possible events and…
We propose a design for philanthropic or publicly-funded seeding to allow (near) optimal provision of a decentralized, self-organizing ecosystem of public goods. The concept extends ideas from Quadratic Voting to a funding mechanism for…
In the online simple knapsack problem items are presented in an iterative fashion and an algorithm has to decide for each item whether to reject or permanently include it into the knapsack without any knowledge about the rest of the…
Assume $k$ candidates need to be selected. The candidates appear over time. Each time one appears, it must be immediately selected or rejected -- a decision that is made by a group of individuals through voting. Assume the voters use…
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,…
We study low sample complexity mechanisms in participatory budgeting (PB), where each voter votes for a preferred allocation of funds to various projects, subject to project costs and total spending constraints. We analyze the distortion…
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…
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…
Neighbor-based collaborative ranking (NCR) techniques follow three consecutive steps to recommend items to each target user: first they calculate the similarities among users, then they estimate concordance of pairwise preferences to the…
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…
Rollout algorithms have demonstrated excellent performance on a variety of dynamic and discrete optimization problems. Interpreted as an approximate dynamic programming algorithm, a rollout algorithm estimates the value-to-go at each…
This research examines how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can improve participatory budgeting processes within smart cities. In response to challenges like declining civic participation and resource allocation conflicts, the study explores…
We discuss an algorithmic intervention aimed at increasing equity and economic efficiency at a crowdfunding platform that gives cash subsidies to grantees. Through a blend of technical and qualitative methods, we show that the previous…
Peer reviews, evaluations, and selections are a fundamental aspect of modern science. Funding bodies the world over employ experts to review and select the best proposals from those submitted for funding. The problem of peer selection,…
We study the dynamic pricing problem with knapsack, addressing the challenge of balancing exploration and exploitation under resource constraints. We introduce three algorithms tailored to different informational settings: a Boundary…
The typical algorithmic problem in viral marketing aims to identify a set of influential users in a social network, who, when convinced to adopt a product, shall influence other users in the network and trigger a large cascade of adoptions.…
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…
We introduce BallotRank, a ranked preference aggregation method derived from a modified PageRank algorithm. It is a Condorcet-consistent method without damping, and empirical examination of nearly 2,000 ranked choice elections and over…