11,948 research outputs found
The Core of the Participatory Budgeting Problem
In participatory budgeting, communities collectively decide on the allocation
of public tax dollars for local public projects. In this work, we consider the
question of fairly aggregating the preferences of community members to
determine an allocation of funds to projects. This problem is different from
standard fair resource allocation because of public goods: The allocated goods
benefit all users simultaneously. Fairness is crucial in participatory decision
making, since generating equitable outcomes is an important goal of these
processes. We argue that the classic game theoretic notion of core captures
fairness in the setting. To compute the core, we first develop a novel
characterization of a public goods market equilibrium called the Lindahl
equilibrium, which is always a core solution. We then provide the first (to our
knowledge) polynomial time algorithm for computing such an equilibrium for a
broad set of utility functions; our algorithm also generalizes (in a
non-trivial way) the well-known concept of proportional fairness. We use our
theoretical insights to perform experiments on real participatory budgeting
voting data. We empirically show that the core can be efficiently computed for
utility functions that naturally model our practical setting, and examine the
relation of the core with the familiar welfare objective. Finally, we address
concerns of incentives and mechanism design by developing a randomized
approximately dominant-strategy truthful mechanism building on the exponential
mechanism from differential privacy
Incentives-Based Mechanism for Efficient Demand Response Programs
In this work we investigate the inefficiency of the electricity system with
strategic agents. Specifically, we prove that without a proper control the
total demand of an inefficient system is at most twice the total demand of the
optimal outcome. We propose an incentives scheme that promotes optimal outcomes
in the inefficient electricity market. The economic incentives can be seen as
an indirect revelation mechanism that allocates resources using a
one-dimensional message space per resource to be allocated. The mechanism does
not request private information from users and is valid for any concave
customer's valuation function. We propose a distributed implementation of the
mechanism using population games and evaluate the performance of four popular
dynamics methods in terms of the cost to implement the mechanism. We find that
the achievement of efficiency in strategic environments might be achieved at a
cost, which is dependent on both the users' preferences and the dynamic
evolution of the system. Some simulation results illustrate the ideas presented
throughout the paper.Comment: 38 pages, 9 figures, submitted to journa
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