2020/09/06 by Piotr Skowron, Skowron, Piotr, Arkadii Slinko +5 · 3 citations
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · Decision Sciences · #Game Theory and Voting Systems #Local Government Finance and Decentralization #Auction Theory and Applications
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2009.02690
In participatory budgeting we are given a set of projects---each with a cost, an available budget, and a set of voters who in some form express their preferences over the projects. The goal is to select---based on voter preferences---a subset of projects whose total cost does not exceed the budget. We propose several aggregation methods based on the idea of cumulative votes, e.g., for the setting when each voter is given one coin and she specifies how this coin should be split among the projects. We compare our aggregation methods based on (1) axiomatic properties, and (2) computer simulations. We identify one method, Minimal Transfers over Costs, that demonstrates particularly desirable behavior. In particular, it significantly improves on existing methods, satisfies a strong notion of proportionality, and, thus, is promising to be used in practice.