The discipline of Social Choice has traditionally focused on simple elections, where voters choose among a small set of alternatives. In this talk, we will describe two directions that have gained additional salience in the digital age: Participatory Budgeting (PB) and Deliberation. In each case, we will describe a platform and concrete algorithmic and empirical results. We will conclude with some high level research directions.
We will start by describing the widely used Stanford Participatory Budgeting Platform. We will present Knapsack Voting, a voting method for PB that guarantees welfare maximization and strategy-proofness under mild utilitarian assumptions, and outline several other objectives that you might want to consider, including justified representation.
We will then describe the Stanford Online Deliberation Platform, which is a video-conferencing platform for civic deliberations that incorporates an automated moderator. We will provide empirical results with this platform, and then also formally describe a sequential negotiation process that has provably good properties.
Finally, we will describe three high level research directions: representational robustness, menu driven participatory budgeting, and mathematical modeling of human deliberation.
Zoom Link: https://icts-res-in.zoom.us/j/94305073037?pwd=Dr45C5k1pU9tajy54RGaUvXgPzxO6O.1
Meeting ID: 943 0507 3037
Passcode: 303031