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

Optimality of (s, S) Inventory Policies under Renewal Demand and General Cost Structures

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142450/1/poms12795_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/142450/2/poms12795.pd

Financial Structure and Economic Welfare: Applied General Equilibrium Development Economics

This review provides a common framework for researchers thinking about the next generation of micro-founded macro models of growth, inequality, and financial deepening, as well as direction for policy makers targeting microfinance programs to alleviate poverty. Topics include treatment of financial structure general equilibrium models: testing for as-if-complete markets or other financial underpinnings; examining dual-sector models with both a perfectly intermediated sector and a sector in financial autarky, as well as a second generation of these models that embeds information problems and other obstacles to trade; designing surveys to capture measures of income, investment/savings, and flow of funds; and aggregating individuals and households to the level of network, village, or national economy. The review concludes with new directions that overcome conceptual and computational limitations.National Science Foundation (U.S.)National Institutes of Health (U.S.)Templeton FoundationBill & Melinda Gates Foundatio

The importance of the altricial – precocial spectrum for social complexity in mammals and birds:A review

Various types of long-term stable relationships that individuals uphold, including cooperation and competition between group members, define social complexity in vertebrates. Numerous life history, physiological and cognitive traits have been shown to affect, or to be affected by, such social relationships. As such, differences in developmental modes, i.e. the ‘altricial-precocial’ spectrum, may play an important role in understanding the interspecific variation in occurrence of social interactions, but to what extent this is the case is unclear because the role of the developmental mode has not been studied directly in across-species studies of sociality. In other words, although there are studies on the effects of developmental mode on brain size, on the effects of brain size on cognition, and on the effects of cognition on social complexity, there are no studies directly investigating the link between developmental mode and social complexity. This is surprising because developmental differences play a significant role in the evolution of, for example, brain size, which is in turn considered an essential building block with respect to social complexity. Here, we compiled an overview of studies on various aspects of the complexity of social systems in altricial and precocial mammals and birds. Although systematic studies are scarce and do not allow for a quantitative comparison, we show that several forms of social relationships and cognitive abilities occur in species along the entire developmental spectrum. Based on the existing evidence it seems that differences in developmental modes play a minor role in whether or not individuals or species are able to meet the cognitive capabilities and requirements for maintaining complex social relationships. Given the scarcity of comparative studies and potential subtle differences, however, we suggest that future studies should consider developmental differences to determine whether our finding is general or whether some of the vast variation in social complexity across species can be explained by developmental mode. This would allow a more detailed assessment of the relative importance of developmental mode in the evolution of vertebrate social systems