TY - GEN
T1 - Participatory Budgeting Designs for the Real World
AU - Fairstein, Roy
AU - Benadè, Gerdus
AU - Gal, Kobi
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2023, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.
PY - 2023/6/27
Y1 - 2023/6/27
N2 - Participatory budgeting engages the public in the process of allocating public money to different types of projects. PB designs differ in how voters are asked to express their preferences over candidate projects and how these preferences are aggregated to determine which projects to fund. This paper studies two fundamental questions in PB design. Which voting format and aggregation method to use, and how to evaluate the outcomes of these design decisions? We conduct an extensive empirical study in which 1 800 participants vote in four participatory budgeting elections in a controlled setting to evaluate the practical effects of the choice of voting format and aggregation rule. We find that k-approval leads to the best user experience. With respect to the aggregation rule, greedy aggregation leads to outcomes that are highly sensitive to the input format used and the fraction of the population that participates. The method of equal shares, in contrast, leads to outcomes that are not sensitive to the type of voting format used, and these outcomes are remarkably stable even when the majority of the population does not participate in the election. These results carry valuable insights for PB practitioners and social choice researchers.
AB - Participatory budgeting engages the public in the process of allocating public money to different types of projects. PB designs differ in how voters are asked to express their preferences over candidate projects and how these preferences are aggregated to determine which projects to fund. This paper studies two fundamental questions in PB design. Which voting format and aggregation method to use, and how to evaluate the outcomes of these design decisions? We conduct an extensive empirical study in which 1 800 participants vote in four participatory budgeting elections in a controlled setting to evaluate the practical effects of the choice of voting format and aggregation rule. We find that k-approval leads to the best user experience. With respect to the aggregation rule, greedy aggregation leads to outcomes that are highly sensitive to the input format used and the fraction of the population that participates. The method of equal shares, in contrast, leads to outcomes that are not sensitive to the type of voting format used, and these outcomes are remarkably stable even when the majority of the population does not participate in the election. These results carry valuable insights for PB practitioners and social choice researchers.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85167728552&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1609/aaai.v37i5.25699
DO - 10.1609/aaai.v37i5.25699
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85167728552
T3 - Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2023
SP - 5633
EP - 5640
BT - AAAI-23 Technical Tracks 5
A2 - Williams, Brian
A2 - Chen, Yiling
A2 - Neville, Jennifer
PB - AAAI press
T2 - 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2023
Y2 - 7 February 2023 through 14 February 2023
ER -