Consider a city that has collected taxes from its residents, and is deciding how to spend the taxes (e.g. build a new hospital or a new road). Residents will express their preferences by voting. Participatory budgeting is the problem of studying how to fairly aggregate the preferences of residents on funding public projects.
In this talk, I will introduce the concept of core stability in participatory budgeting and the related problems. Then I will present the main results of my recent work on three aspects of the topic: the algorithm(s) to find a constant approximation to the core of participatory budgeting (Munagala et al., 2022a); auditing for core stability (Munagala et al., 2022b); core stability with allocation constraints (Mavrov et al., 2023). Finally, I will discuss some directions for future research.
Yiheng Shen is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at Duke University. His research interests lie in the interface of economics and computation, especially mechanism design and algorithmic game theory. Prior to joining Duke, he received a bachelor's degree at Tsinghua University's Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences.
LSRC D344 or join virtually via Zoom https://duke.zoom.us/j/92510717076