Participatory Budget Allocation Method for Approval Ballots

TL;DR

This paper introduces generalized preference aggregation methods for participatory budgeting with approval ballots, adapting social choice rules to improve fairness and efficiency in budget allocations.

Contribution

It extends known social choice methods like Sequential Chamberlin Courant and Monroe rules to participatory budgeting, providing polynomial algorithms and fairness analysis.

Findings

Algorithms satisfy proportional representation to a significant extent.

Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

The methods are computationally feasible for practical use.

Abstract

In this paper, we study the problem of Participatory Budgeting (PB) with approval ballots, inspired by Multi-Winner Voting schemes. We present generalized preference aggregation methods for participatory budgeting, especially for finding seemingly fair budget allocations. To achieve this, we generalize such preference aggregation methods from the well-known methods, namely the Sequential Chamberlin Courant rule and the Sequential Monroe Rule in the realm of social choice theory. Further, we provide an experimental evaluation of the preference aggregation methods using an impartial culture method of preference generation and study the extent to which such polynomial time algorithms satisfy one of the most popular notions of fairness called proportional representation.