# What Should We Optimize in Participatory Budgeting? An Experimental Study

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.07308 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07308/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Justified Representation in Approval-Based Committee Voting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1407.8269/) (2014)
- [Participatory Budgeting: Models and Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.00606/) (2020)
- [Fair Allocation of Indivisible Public Goods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.03164/) (2018)
- [The Core of the Participatory Budgeting Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.03474/) (2016)
- [Knapsack Voting for Participatory Budgeting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06856/) (2020)
- [Proportionally Representative Participatory Budgeting: Axioms and Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08226/) (2017)
- [Proportionally Representative Participatory Budgeting with Ordinal Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00864/) (2019)
- [Fair Knapsack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.04520/) (2017)
- [A Framework for Approval-based Budgeting Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04382/) (2018)
- [Modeling Voters in Multi-Winner Approval Voting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.02811/) (2020)
- [Heuristic Strategies in Uncertain Approval Voting Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00011/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Maxmin Participatory Budgeting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.13923/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a process in which voters decide how to allocate a common budget; most commonly it is done by ordinary people -- in particular, residents of some municipality -- to decide on a fraction of the municipal budget. From a social choice perspective, existing research on PB focuses almost exclusively on designing computationally-efficient aggregation methods that satisfy certain axiomatic properties deemed "desirable" by the research community. Our work complements this line of research through a user study (N = 215) involving several experiments aimed at identifying what potential voters (i.e., non-experts) deem fair or desirable in simple PB settings. Our results show that some modern PB aggregation techniques greatly differ from users' expectations, while other, more standard approaches, provide more aligned results. We also identify a few possible discrepancies between what non-experts consider saydesirable and how they perceive the notion of "fairness" in the PB context. Taken jointly, our results can be used to help the research community identify appropriate PB aggregation methods to use in practice.