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arxiv 2203.09971 v1 pith:M2JBEE6Z submitted 2022-03-18 cs.GT

Truthful Aggregation of Budget Proposals with Proportionality Guarantees

classification cs.GT
keywords mechanismsbudgetphantommechanismmovingprojectsproportionalproportionality
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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We study a participatory budgeting problem, where a set of strategic agents wish to split a divisible budget among different projects, by aggregating their proposals on a single division. Unfortunately, the straight-forward rule that divides the budget proportionally is susceptible to manipulation. In a recent work, Freeman et al. [arXiv:1905.00457] proposed a class of truthful mechanisms, called moving phantom mechanisms. Among others, they propose a proportional mechanism, in the sense that in the extreme case where all agents prefer a single project to receive the whole amount, the budget is assigned proportionally. While proportionality is a naturally desired property, it is defined over a limited type of preference profiles. To address this, we expand the notion of proportionality, by proposing a quantitative framework which evaluates a budget aggregation mechanism according to its worst-case distance from the proportional allocation. Crucially, this is defined for every preference profile. We study this measure on the class of moving phantom mechanisms, and we provide approximation guarantees. For two projects, we show that the Uniform Phantom mechanism is the optimal among all truthful mechanisms. For three projects, we propose a new, proportional mechanism which is virtually optimal among all moving phantom mechanisms. Finally, we provide impossibility results regarding the approximability of moving phantom mechanisms.

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Cited by 1 Pith paper

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  1. What Are People's Actual Utility Functions in Budget Aggregation?

    cs.GT 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Empirical polls with hundreds of participants show standard utility models like L1, L2, and Leontief fail to describe most people's preferences in budget aggregation, while star-shaped, multi-dimensional single-peaked...