*********************************
There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
*********************************
Title:
Preference elicitation for participatory budgeting
Abstract:
Participatory budgeting enables the allocation of public funds by collecting and aggregating individual preferences; it has already had a sizable real-world impact. But making the most of this new paradigm requires a rethinking of some of the basics of computational social choice, including the very way in which individuals express their preferences. We analytically compare four preference elicitation methods — knapsack votes, rankings by value or value for money, and threshold approval votes — through the lens of implicit utilitarian voting, and find that threshold approval votes are qualitatively superior. This conclusion is supported by experiments using data from real participatory budgeting elections, while a user study examines the practical implications of the respective methods.
Bio:
Gerdus is a PhD student in operations research at Carnegie Mellon University; he is advised by Ariel Procaccia and John Hooker. His research interests include computational social choice, fair division and discrete optimization. His work emphasizes the impact of human factors like bias, incomplete information and various notions of fairness on traditional voting and assignment problems.
