AitF: Collaborative Research: Fair and Efficient Societal Decision Making via Collaborative Convex Optimization

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YouTube competes with Hollywood as an entertainment channel, and also 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. As opposed to building consensus and compromise, public discussion boards often devolve into flame wars when dealing with contentious socio-political issues. This project aims to develop algorithms and platforms for collaborative decision making at scale. These platforms will be deployed in real decision-making processes, resulting in substantial broad impact.Much of the work will be informed by participatory budgeting, where a group of users collectively produce a budget. Since budgetary constraints can be modeled as convex constraints, the insights from participatory budgeting will then be applied to more general convex decision spaces.On the algorithmic side, the PIs propose to develop algorithms and mechanisms for consensus that go beyond simple voting. In complex decision spaces, the normal voting methodology of ranking a set of candidates breaks down, and we need new mechanisms. For example, for participatory budgeting, the users might be asked to solve a knapsack problem, providing a complete budget. This leads to exciting directions in incentive compatibility, opinion dynamics, fairness, and convex optimization. Indeed, the PIs believe that this is the natural next step in the evolution of social choice theory, and would represent a substantial intellectual advance in both algorithms and mechanism design.On the experimental and evaluation side, this work will take the deliberative polling methodology developed by Co-PI Fishkin, and design tools for extending it to participatory budgeting. This project will also evaluate how deliberative polling can scale to large online communities. This is a natural next step in the evolution of deliberative democracy.On the deployment side, this project will advance our understanding of how to design interfaces for discussion, collaboration, and voting that lead to genuine deliberation and consensus on complex problems, as opposed to devolving into vitriol like many discussion boards and comment threads.