A Mechanism for Participatory Budgeting With Funding Constraints and Project Interactions
Mohak Goyal, Sahasrajit Sarmasarkar, and Ashish Goel

TL;DR
This paper introduces a novel participatory budgeting mechanism that accounts for project interactions and funding constraints, extending existing models to better reflect practical voting scenarios and analyzing their strategic and computational properties.
Contribution
It proposes a new preference elicitation scheme for project interactions and generalizes the aggregation model to 1-laminar funding constraints, maintaining strategyproofness under certain conditions.
Findings
Strategyproofness holds under 1-laminar funding constraints.
Preference aggregation for project interactions is NP-hard.
A fixed parameter tractable algorithm is provided for social welfare maximization.
Abstract
Participatory budgeting (PB) has been widely adopted and has attracted significant research efforts; however, there is a lack of mechanisms for PB which elicit project interactions, such as substitution and complementarity, from voters. Also, the outcomes of PB in practice are subject to various minimum/maximum funding constraints on 'types' of projects. We propose a novel preference elicitation scheme for PB which allows voters to express how their utilities from projects within 'groups' interact. We consider preference aggregation done under minimum and maximum funding constraints on 'types' of projects, where a project can have multiple type labels as long as this classification can be defined by a 1-laminar structure (henceforth called 1-laminar funding constraints). Overall, we extend the Knapsack voting model of Goel et al. [26] in two ways - enriching the preference elicitation…
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Taxonomy
TopicsGame Theory and Voting Systems · Auction Theory and Applications · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
