Participatory Budgeting with Project Groups

Participatory Budgeting with Project Groups

Pallavi Jain, Krzysztof Sornat, Nimrod Talmon, Meirav Zehavi

Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 276-282. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2021/39

We study a generalization of the standard approval-based model of participatory budgeting (PB), in which voters are providing approval ballots over a set of predefined projects and---in addition to a global budget limit---there are several groupings of the projects, each group with its own budget limit. We study the computational complexity of identifying project bundles that maximize voter satisfaction while respecting all budget limits. We show that the problem is generally intractable and describe efficient exact algorithms for several special cases, including instances with only few groups and instances where the group structure is close to being hierarchical, as well as efficient approximation algorithms. Our results could allow, e.g., municipalities to hold richer PB processes that are thematically and geographically inclusive.
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Computational Social Choice
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Voting
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Economic Paradigms, Auctions and Market-Based Systems