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Coordinating Monetary Contributions in Participatory Budgeting

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Algorithmic Game Theory (SAGT 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14238))

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Abstract

We formalize a framework for coordinating funding and selecting projects, the costs of which are shared among agents with quasi-linear utility functions and individual budgets. Our model contains the discrete participatory budgeting model as a special case, while capturing other useful scenarios. We propose several important axioms and objectives and study how well they can be simultaneously satisfied. We show that whereas welfare maximization admits an FPTAS, welfare maximization subject to a natural and very weak participation requirement leads to a strong inapproximability. This result is bypassed if we consider some natural restricted valuations, namely laminar single-minded valuations and symmetric valuations. Our analysis for the former restriction leads to the discovery of a new class of tractable instances for the set-union knapsack problem, a classical problem in combinatorial optimization.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    local.gov.uk/case-studies/govanhill-glasgow.

  2. 2.

    hudexchange.info/programs/participatory-budgeting.

  3. 3.

    An algorithm which approximates the optimal solution by a factor of at least \(1-\epsilon \) in time polynomial in the instance size and \(1/\epsilon \) for any \(\epsilon >0\).

  4. 4.

    Consider an instance with two agents and one project with \(C_1=1\), valuations \(v_{11}= 2\) and \(v_{21}=0\), and budgets \(b_1=0\) and \(b_2 =1\). The UWO outcome is to fund the project, but this violates WP.

  5. 5.

    Specifically, we can sort the projects according to their social welfare and greedily select them until there is no remaining project with non-negative social welfare or until no budget remains.

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Acknowledgements

Haris Aziz is supported by the NSF-CSIRO project on “Fair Sequential Collective Decision-Making”. Mashbat Suzuki was partially supported by the ARC Laureate Project FL200100204 on “Trustworthy AI”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. UNSW Sydney, Kensington, Australia

    Haris Aziz, Mashbat Suzuki & Jeremy Vollen

  2. IIIT Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India

    Sujit Gujar & Manisha Padala

Authors
  1. Haris Aziz
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  2. Sujit Gujar
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  3. Manisha Padala
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  4. Mashbat Suzuki
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  5. Jeremy Vollen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mashbat Suzuki .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Royal Holloway University of London, Egham, UK

    Argyrios Deligkas

  2. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Aris Filos-Ratsikas

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Aziz, H., Gujar, S., Padala, M., Suzuki, M., Vollen, J. (2023). Coordinating Monetary Contributions in Participatory Budgeting. In: Deligkas, A., Filos-Ratsikas, A. (eds) Algorithmic Game Theory. SAGT 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14238. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43254-5_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43254-5_9

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