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. ES, 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.

Participatory Budgeting Designs for the Real World


Participatory 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. Past research has studied the trade-off between notions of social welfare and fairness in the multi-winner setting (a special case of participatory budgeting with identical project costs) by Lackner and Skowron (2020). 
But there is little understanding of this trade-off in the more general PB setting. 
This paper provides a theoretical and empirical study of the worst-case guarantees of several common rules to better understand the trade-off between social welfare, representation. 
We show that many of the guarantees from the multi-winner setting do not generalize to the PB setting, and that the introduction of costs leads to substantially worse guarantees, thereby exacerbating the welfare-representation trade-off. 
We extend our theoretical analysis to studying how the requirement of proportionality over voting rules affects this trade-off. 
We further study how the requirement of proportionality over voting rules effects the guarantees on social welfare and representation. We study the latter point also empirically, both on real and synthetic datasets. 
We show that variants of the recently suggested voting rule Rule-X (which satisfies proportionality) do very well in practice both with respect to social welfare and representation.

Welfare vs. Representation in Participatory Budgeting

GTEP: Social Choice / Voting 1

poster

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Oral Session 2A1-2

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AAMAS (International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems) is the largest and most influential conference in the area of agents and multiagent systems. The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners in all areas of agent technology and to provide a single, high-profile, internationally renowned forum for research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multiagent systems. AAMAS is the flagship conference of the non-profit International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS).

Roy Fairstein

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Participatory Budgeting Designs for the Real World

Welfare vs. Representation in Participatory Budgeting

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