Heterogeneous participation and allocation skews: when is choice "worth it"?

TL;DR

This paper examines how complex mechanisms in economics and computation can lead to unequal participation, favoring already advantaged individuals, and discusses strategies to design more inclusive decision-making systems.

Contribution

It highlights the issue of heterogeneous participation in mechanism design and offers practical lessons to create systems that balance preference gathering with inclusivity.

Findings

Empirical evidence of participation disparities in democratic mechanisms.

Analysis of case studies including school matching and crowdsourcing.

Recommendations for designing mechanisms that mitigate participation bias.

Abstract

A core ethos of the Economics and Computation (EconCS) community is that people have complex private preferences and information of which the central planner is unaware, but which an appropriately designed mechanism can uncover to improve collective decisionmaking. This ethos underlies the community's largest deployed success stories, from stable matching systems to participatory budgeting. I ask: is this choice and information aggregation ``worth it''? In particular, I discuss how such systems induce \textit{heterogeneous participation}: those already relatively advantaged are, empirically, more able to pay time costs and navigate administrative burdens imposed by the mechanisms. I draw on three case studies, including my own work -- complex democratic mechanisms, resident crowdsourcing, and school matching. I end with lessons for practice and research, challenging the community to help reduce participation heterogeneity and design and deploy mechanisms that meet a ``best of both worlds'' north star: \textit{use preferences and information from those who choose to participate, but provide a ``sufficient'' quality of service to those who do not.}