Participatory Funding Coordination: Model, Axioms and Rules

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new model for collective decision making in crowdfunding, defining axioms and rules to balance fairness, efficiency, and participation, supported by experimental analysis.

Contribution

It formalizes a novel model for participatory funding, proposes axioms and rules, and evaluates their performance through experiments.

Findings

Certain rules satisfy multiple axioms simultaneously

Enforcing fairness impacts overall efficiency

Experimental results compare rule performance and fairness trade-offs

Abstract

We present a new model of collective decision making that captures important crowd-funding and donor coordination scenarios. In the setting, there is a set of projects (each with its own cost) and a set of agents (that have their budgets as well as preferences over the projects). An outcome is a set of projects that are funded along with the specific contributions made by the agents. For the model, we identify meaningful axioms that capture concerns including fairness, efficiency, and participation incentives. We then propose desirable rules for the model and study, which sets of axioms can be satisfied simultaneously. An experimental study indicates the relative performance of different rules as well as the price of enforcing fairness axioms.