Related papers: Upgrading Democracies with Fairer Voting Methods
We study the voting problem with two alternatives where voters' preferences depend on a not-directly-observable state variable. While equilibria in the one-round voting mechanisms lead to a good decision, they are usually hard to compute…
Do robots vote? Do machines make decisions instead of us? No, (at least not yet), but this is something that could happen. The impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on democracy is a complex issue that requires thorough research and…
In participatory budgeting (PB), voters decide through voting which subset of projects to fund within a given budget. Proportionality in the context of PB is crucial to ensure equal treatment of all groups of voters. However, pure…
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…
Analyses of voting algorithms often overlook informational externalities shaping individual votes. For example, pre-polling information often skews voters towards candidates who may not be their top choice, but who they believe would be a…
We study elections where voters are faced with the challenge of expressing preferences over an extreme number of issues under consideration. This is largely motivated by emerging blockchain governance systems, which include voters with…
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…
In this paper we extend the principle of proportional representation to rankings. We consider the setting where alternatives need to be ranked based on approval preferences. In this setting, proportional representation requires that…
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…
Elections for public offices in democratic nations are large-scale examples of collective decision-making. As a complex system with a multitude of interactions among agents, we can anticipate that universal macroscopic patterns could emerge…
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…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a voting paradigm for distributing a divisible resource, usually called a budget, among a set of projects by aggregating the preferences of individuals over these projects. It is implemented quite extensively…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic paradigm whereby voters decide on a set of projects to fund with a limited budget. We consider PB in a setting where voters report ordinal preferences over projects and have (possibly) asymmetric…
Which level of voting costs is optimal in a democracy? This paper argues that intermediate voting costs - what we term a "Midcost democracy" - should be avoided, as they fail to ensure that electoral outcomes reflect the preferences of the…
Recent breakthroughs in generative artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) unravel new capabilities for AI personal assistants to overcome cognitive bandwidth limitations of humans, providing decision support or even…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process where citizens jointly decide on how to allocate public funds to indivisible projects. This paper focuses on PB processes where citizens may give additional money to projects they want to…
Citizens' assemblies are an increasingly influential form of deliberative democracy, where randomly selected people discuss policy questions. The legitimacy of these assemblies hinges on their representation of the broader population, but…
Participatory budgeting refers to the practice of allocating public resources by collecting and aggregating individual preferences. Most existing studies in this field often assume an additive utility function, where each individual holds a…
Digital deliberation has expanded democratic participation, yet challenges remain. This includes processing information at scale, moderating discussions, fact-checking, or attracting people to participate. Recent advances in artificial…