Participatory Budgeting Designs for the Real World

Roy Fairstein, Gerdus Benadè, Kobi Gal

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAAAI-23 Technical Tracks 5
EditorsBrian Williams, Yiling Chen, Jennifer Neville
PublisherAAAI press
Pages5633-5640
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781577358800
DOIs
StatePublished - 27 Jun 2023
Event37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2023 - Washington, United States
Duration: 7 Feb 202314 Feb 2023

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2023
Volume37

Conference

Conference37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2023
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityWashington
Period7/02/2314/02/23

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Artificial Intelligence

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