supplements Hollywood by acting as a distribution mechanism. Twitter
has a similar relationship to news media, and Coursera to
Universities. But there are no online alternatives for making
democratic decisions at large scale as a society. In this talk, we
will describe two algorithmic approaches towards large scale decision
making that we are exploring.
a) Knapsack voting and participatory budgeting: All budget problems
are knapsack problems at their heart, since the goal is to pack the
largest amount of societal value into a budget. This naturally leads
to "knapsack voting" where each voter solves a knapsack problem, or
comparison-based voting where each voter compares pairs of projects in
terms of benefit-per-dollar. We analyze natural aggregation algorithms
for these mechanisms, and show that knapsack voting is strategy-proof.
We will also describe our experience with helping implement
participatory budgeting in close to two dozen cities and
municipalities, and briefly comment on issues of fairness.
b) Triadic consensus: Here, we divide individuals into small groups
(say groups of three) and ask them to come to consensus; the results
of the triadic deliberations in each round form the input to the next
round. We show that this method is efficient and strategy-proof in
fairly general settings, whereas no pair-wise deliberation process can
have the same properties.
This is joint work with Tanja Aitamurto, Brandon Fain, Anilesh
Krishnaswamy, David Lee, Kamesh Munagala, and Sukolsak Sakshuwong.