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Knapsack Voting for Participatory Budgeting

Published: 29 July 2019 Publication History

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.

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Information

Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation
ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation  Volume 7, Issue 2
May 2019
170 pages
ISSN:2167-8375
EISSN:2167-8383
DOI:10.1145/3340299
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 29 July 2019
Accepted: 01 May 2019
Revised: 01 November 2018
Received: 01 April 2017
Published in TEAC Volume 7, Issue 2

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Author Tags

  1. Participatory budgeting
  2. digital voting
  3. social choice

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Hybrid Participatory Budgeting: Divisible, Indivisible, and BeyondProceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems10.5555/3635637.3663200(2480-2482)Online publication date: 6-May-2024
  • (2024)Strategic Cost Selection in Participatory BudgetingProceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems10.5555/3635637.3663125(2255-2257)Online publication date: 6-May-2024
  • (2024)Value Alignment in Participatory BudgetingProceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems10.5555/3635637.3663030(1692-1700)Online publication date: 6-May-2024
  • (2024)Fine-Grained Liquid Democracy for Cumulative BallotsProceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems10.5555/3635637.3662958(1029-1037)Online publication date: 6-May-2024
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  • (2024)How Much Data Is Sufficient to Learn High-Performing Algorithms?Journal of the ACM10.1145/367627871:5(1-58)Online publication date: 29-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Designing Digital Voting Systems for Citizens: Achieving Fairness and Legitimacy in Participatory BudgetingDigital Government: Research and Practice10.1145/36653325:3(1-30)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Opinion Change or Differential Turnout: Changing Opinions on the Austin Police Department in a Budget Feedback ProcessDigital Government: Research and Practice10.1145/36648225:3(1-32)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Fairness in Streaming Submodular Maximization Subject to a Knapsack ConstraintProceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1145/3637528.3671778(514-525)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2024
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