Date:
Location:
February 17, 1-2pm in SEC 1.413
Dominik Peters (LAMSADE)
The Method of Equal Shares for Participatory Budgeting
In Participatory Budgeting, cities allow their residents to influence the city’s budget through a vote. The standard voting method simply sorts the project proposals by their number of votes, and then greedily selects projects until the budget limit is reached. We have developed a new voting rule, the Method of Equal Shares, that leads to fairer outcomes. It does this by providing proportional representation. Our method will be used for the first time in 2023 in two small cities in Europe: in Aarau in Switzerland and in Wielieczka in Poland. In this talk, I will explain how the method works and the formal proportionality guarantees it satisfies. I will also show data from simulations: because we have full election data from several cities, we can simulate what would have happened if those cities had used the Method of Equal Shares. Thus, we can compare how well the voters’ preferences are represented by our method compared to the standard method.