Ashish Goel
Skip Abstract Section
Abstract
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 setting, which we call “Knapsack Voting.” We study its strategic properties—we show that it is strategy-proof under a natural model of utility (a dis-utility given by the ℓ1 distance between the outcome and the true preference of the voter) and “partially” strategy-proof under general additive utilities. We extend Knapsack Voting to more general settings with revenues, deficits, or surpluses and prove a similar strategy-proofness result. To further demonstrate the applicability of our scheme, we discuss its implementation on the digital voting platform that we have deployed in partnership with the local government bodies in many cities across the nation. From voting data thus collected, we present empirical evidence that Knapsack Voting works well in practice.
- Francisco J. André, M. Alejandro Cardenete, and Carlos Romero. 2010. Designing Public Policies: An Approach Based on Multi-criteria Analysis and Computable General Equilibrium Modeling. Vol. 642. Springer Science 8 Business Media. Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Kenneth J. Arrow. 2012. Social Choice and Individual Values. Vol. 12. Yale University Press.Google Scholar
- Salvador Barberà, Faruk Gul, and Ennio Stacchetti. 1993. Generalized median voter schemes and committees. J. Econ. Theory 61, 2 (1993), 262--289.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Salvador Barberà, Jordi Massó, and Alejandro Neme. 1997. Voting under constraints. J. Econ. Theory 76, 2 (1997), 298--321.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Gerdus Benade, Swaprava Nath, Ariel D. Procaccia, and Nisarg Shah. 2017. Preference elicitation for participatory budgeting. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI’17). 376--382. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sanjai Bhagat and James A. Brickley. 1984. Cumulative voting: The value of minority shareholder voting rights. J. Law Econ. 27, 2 (1984), 339--365.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Duncan Black. 1948. The decisions of a committee using a special majority. Econometrica 16, 3 (1948), 245--261.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Kim C. Border and James S. Jordan. 1983. Straightforward elections, unanimity and phantom voters. Rev. Econ. Stud. 50, 1 (1983), 153--170.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Steven J. Brams. 1990. Constrained approval voting: A voting system to elect a governing board. Interfaces 20, 5 (1990), 67--80. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Steven J. Brams. 1993. Approval voting and the good society. PEGS Newslett. 3, 1 (1993), 10--14.Google Scholar
- Steven J. Brams and Peter C. Fishburn. 1978. Approval Voting. Vol. 72. Cambridge University Press. 831--847 pages.Google Scholar
- Steven J. Brams and Peter C. Fishburn. 2002. Voting procedures, Ch. 4 in the Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, Vol. 1 (2002).Google Scholar
- Eric Budish. 2011. The combinatorial assignment problem: Approximate competitive equilibrium from equal incomes. J. Pol. Econ. 119, 6 (2011), 1061--1103.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Yves Cabannes. 2004. Participatory budgeting: A significant contribution to participatory democracy. Environ. Urban. 16, 1 (2004), 27--46.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Donald E. Campbell and Jerry S. Kelly. 2000. Weak independence and veto power. Econ. Lett. 66, 2 (2000), 183--189.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Ioannis Caragiannis, David Kurokawa, Hervé Moulin, Ariel D. Procaccia, Nisarg Shah, and Junxing Wang. 2016. The unreasonable fairness of maximum Nash welfare. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on Economics and Computation. ACM, 305--322. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Vince Conitzer, Markus Brill, and Rupert Freeman. 2015. Crowdsourcing societal tradeoffs. In Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 1213--1217. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Vincent Conitzer and Tuomas Sandholm. 2012. Common voting rules as maximum likelihood estimators. In Proceedings of the Twenty-First Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI'05). 145--152. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Varsha Dani. 2017. Truthful and near-optimal mechanisms for welfare maximization in participatory budgeting. (unpublished).Google Scholar
- Nelson Dias. 2014. Hope for democracy: 25 years of participatory budgeting worldwide. www.in-loco.pt.Google Scholar
- John Duggan and Thomas Schwartz. 2000. Strategic manipulability without resoluteness or shared beliefs: Gibbard-Satterthwaite generalized. Soc. Choice Welfare 17, 1 (2000), 85--93.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Brandon Fain, Ashish Goel, and Kamesh Munagala. 2016. The core of the participatory budgeting problem. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Web and Internet Economics. Springer, 384--399. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Rupert Freeman, David M Pennock, Dominik Peters, and Jennifer Wortman Vaughan. 2019. Truthful aggregation of budget proposals. arXiv preprint arXiv:1905.00457 (2019). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ernesto Ganuza and Gianpaolo Baiocchi. 2012. The power of ambiguity: How participatory budgeting travels the globe. J. Publ. Delib. 8, 2 (2012), 8.Google Scholar
- Nikhil Garg, Vijay Kamble, Ashish Goel, David Marn, and Kamesh Munagala. 2017. Collaborative optimization for collective decision-making in continuous spaces. In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, 617--626. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Allan Gibbard. 1973. Manipulation of voting schemes: A general result. Econometrica 41, 4 (1973), 587--601.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Nam Wook Kim, Jonghyuk Jung, Eun-Young Ko, Songyi Han, Chang Won Lee, Juho Kim, and Jihee Kim. 2016. Budgetmap: Engaging taxpayers in the issue-driven classification of a government budget. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 8 Social Computing. ACM, 1028--1039. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Christian Klamler, Ulrich Pferschy, and Stefan Ruzika. 2012. Committee selection under weight constraints. Math. Soc. Sci. 64, 1 (2012), 48--56.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jonathan Levin and Barry Nalebuff. 1995. An introduction to vote-counting schemes. J. Econ. Perspect. 9, 1 (1995), 3--26.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Richard J. Lipton, Evangelos Markakis, Elchanan Mossel, and Amin Saberi. 2004. On approximately fair allocations of indivisible goods. In Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce. ACM, 125--131. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tyler Lu and Craig Boutilier. 2011. Budgeted social choice: From consensus to personalized decision making. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI’11). 280--286. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Hervé Moulin. 1980. On strategy-proofness and single peakedness. Public Choice 35, 4 (1980), 437--455.Google ScholarCross Ref
- K. Nehring and Clemens Puppe. 2002. Strategy-proof social choice on single-peaked domains: Possibility, impossibility and the space between. Unpublished, Department of Economics, University of California at Davis.Google Scholar
- Richard G. Niemi. 1984. The problem of strategic behavior under approval voting. Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 78, 4 (1984), 952--958.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Carole Pateman. 2012. Participatory democracy revisited. Perspect. Pol. 10, 1 (2012), 7--19.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP). 2016. Where has it worked? Retrieved from http://www.participatorybudgeting.org/about-participatory-budgeting/where-has-it-worked/.Google Scholar
- Ariel D. Procaccia, Sashank J. Reddi, and Nisarg Shah. 2012. A maximum likelihood approach for selecting sets of alternatives. In Proceedings of the Twenty-First Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI'12). 695--704. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Mark Allen Satterthwaite. 1975. Strategy-proofness and Arrow’s conditions: Existence and correspondence theorems for voting procedures and social welfare functions. J. Econ. Theory 10, 2 (1975), 187--217.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Aaron Schneider and Ben Goldfrank. 2002. Budgets and ballots in Brazil: Participatory budgeting from the city to the state. Working Paper Series 149 (2002). Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, UK.Google Scholar
- Graham Smith. 2009. Democratic Innovations: Designing Institutions for Citizen Participation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Google ScholarCross Ref
- H. Peyton Young. 1974. An axiomatization of Borda’s rule. J. Econ. Theory 9, 1 (1974), 43--52.Google ScholarCross Ref
- H. Peyton Young. 1988. Condorcet’s theory of voting. Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 82, 4 (1988), 1231--1244.Google ScholarCross Ref
Index Terms
- Knapsack Voting for Participatory Budgeting
Recommendations
Coordinating Monetary Contributions in Participatory Budgeting
Algorithmic Game TheoryAbstractWe 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 discrete participatory budgeting model as a ...
Welfare vs. Representation in Participatory Budgeting
AAMAS '22: Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent SystemsParticipatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process for allocating funds to projects based on the votes of members of the community. Different rules have been used to aggregate participants' votes.
A recent paper by Lackner and Skowron [12] studied the ...
Proportionally Representative Participatory Budgeting: Axioms and Algorithms
AAMAS '18: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent SystemsParticipatory budgeting is one of the exciting developments in deliberative grassroots democracy. We concentrate on approval elections and propose proportional representation axioms in participatory budgeting, by generalizing relevant axioms for ...
Comments