Budget-proposal aggregation

Budget-proposal aggregation (BPA) is a problem in social choice theory. A group has to decide on how to distribute its budget among several issues. Each group-member has a different idea about what the ideal budget-distribution should be. The problem is how to aggregate the different opinions into a single budget-distribution program.

BPA is a special case of participatory budgeting, with the following characteristics:

  1. The issues are divisible and unbounded – each issue can be allocated any amount, as long as the sum of allocations equals the total budget.
  2. Agents' preferences are given by single-peaked preferences over an ideal budget.

It is also a special case of fractional social choice (portioning), in which agents express their preferences by stating their ideal distribution, rather than by a ranking of the issues.

Another sense in which aggregation in budgeting has been studied is as follows. Suppose a manager asks his worker to submit a budget-proposal for a project. The worker can over-report the project cost, in order to get the slack to himself. Knowing that, the manager might reject the worker's proposal when it is too high, even though the high cost might be real. To mitigate this effect, it is possible to ask the worker for aggregate budget-proposals (for several projects at once). The experiment shows that this approach can indeed improve the efficiency of the process.

The same problem has been studied in the context of aggregating probability distributions. Suppose each citizen in society has a certain probability-distribution over candidates, representing the probability that the citizen prefers each candidate. The goal is to aggregate all distributions to a single probability-distribution, representing the probability that society should choose each candidate.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.