We consider a multi-agent resource allocation setting in which an agent's utility may decrease or increase when an item is allocated. We take the group envy-freeness concept that is well-established in the literature and present stronger and relaxed versions that are especially suitable for the allocation of indivisible items. Of particular interest is a concept called group envy-freeness up to one item (GEF1). We then present a clear taxonomy of the fairness concepts. We study which fairness concepts guarantee the existence of a fair allocation under which preference domain. For two natural classes of additive utilities, we design polynomial-time algorithms to compute a GEF1 allocation. We also prove that checking whether a given allocation satisfies GEF1 is coNP-complete when there are either only goods, only chores or both.
We introduce a new approach for designing rules for participatory budgeting, the problem of deciding on the use of public funds based directly on the views expressed by the citizens concerned. The core idea is to embed instances of the participatory budgeting problem into judgment aggregation, a powerful general-purpose framework for modelling collective decision making. Taking advantage of the possibilities offered by judgment aggregation, we enrich the familiar setting of participatory budgeting with additional constraints, namely dependencies between projects and quotas regarding different types of projects. We analyse the rules obtained both in algorithmic and in axiomatic terms.
Participatory Budgeting (PB) processes are usually designed to span several years, with referenda for new budget allocations taking place regularly. This paper presents a first formal framework for long-term PB, based on a sequence of budgeting problems as main input. We introduce a theory of fairness for this setting, focusing on three main concepts that apply to types (groups) of voters:
(i) achieving equal welfare for all types, (ii) minimizing inequality of welfare (as measured by the Gini coefficient), and (iii) achieving equal welfare in the long run.
We investigate under which conditions these criteria can be satisfied, and analyze the computational complexity of verifying whether they hold.
We put forward a formal model of participatory budgeting where projects can incur costs with respect to several different resources, such as money, energy, or emission allowances. We generalise several wellknown mechanisms from the usual single-resource setting to this multiresource setting and analyse their algorithmic efficiency, the extent to which they are immune to strategic manipulation, and the degree of proportional representation they can guarantee. We also prove a general impossibility theorem establishing the incompatibility of proportionality and strategyproofness for this model.
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