How can we make participatory budgeting fair and efficient?
Exploring Welfare Maximization and Fairness in Participatory Budgeting
This thesis explores how to fairly and efficiently distribute a budget across a set of projects based on people's preferences. It considers different ways people can express their preferences (simple approval, ranking, ranking with cost limits) and different constraints on project costs (fixed, flexible, partially flexible).
The key points relevant to LLM-based multi-agent systems are the characterizations of unanimous and strategy-proof random social choice rules, particularly under the context of single-peaked preferences. The thesis proposes novel fairness notions (weak-GEG and strong-GEG) that are relevant to scenarios where voters are divided into groups, ensuring fair representation for each group. These characterizations and fairness notions can be valuable when designing multi-agent systems where LLMs need to make fair and strategic decisions based on potentially conflicting preferences of different agents or groups of agents.