Collaborative Research: RI: Medium: Informed, Fair, Efficient, and Incentive-Aware Group Decision Making

在我们快节奏和日益在线的世界中，做出公平，公正和明智的决策比以往任何时候都更加重要和困难。在一个群体必须达成共识的情况下，在各种各样和迅速变化的信息面前，实现公平和公正变得更加困难。作为回应，本项目将结合联合收割机的研究，从社会选择理论和信息启发，创造一个新的研究方向称为知情群体决策。 这个新的研究领域扩展了现有的模型和机制的群体决策明确占的作用，信息对代理人的最终决策。 最终的目标是开发新的模型和方法，可以用来激励个人，以确保群体决策达到预期的结果。 本研究具有跨机构、跨教育、跨社会的影响，将拓宽弱势群体在计算研究中的参与，培养高素质的专业人才，吸引弱势群体的学生从事计算相关领域的研究。本研究包括三个基础研究维度和一个理论与实践的桥梁方向。维度1：表示的目的是开发新的模型，结合代理的主观和客观的偏好，信息和查询的响应。维度二：聚合的目的是引入新的效率和公平的标准，知情的群体决策，并设计新的机制，以实现他们的真实，合作的代理。维度三：激励机制旨在通过提出新的均衡概念，对代理人的行为进行分析，并设计新的激励感知机制来解决知情群体决策中代理人的激励问题。为了连接理论和实践，该项目中开发的模型、算法和机制将通过各种教育和推广活动在开源的在线偏好报告和聚合（OPRA）系统中部署、验证和完善。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

In our fast-paced and increasingly online world making fair, equitable, and informed decisions is both more important and harder than ever. In situations where a group must come to a consensus, in the presence of varied and rapidly changing information, achieving fairness and equity becomes even more difficult. In response, this project will combine research from social choice theory and information elicitation to create a new research direction called informed group decision making. This new research area extends current models and mechanisms of group decision making by explicitly accounting for the role that information has on agents' final decisions. The final goal is to develop new models and methods that can be used to incentivize individuals to ensure group decisions achieve a desired outcome. This research promises cross-institutional, educational, and societal impacts and will broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in computing research, train highly qualified professionals, and engage students from underrepresented groups to pursue studies in computing-related fields.This research consists of three dimensions for foundational research and one direction for bridging theory and practice. Dimension 1: Representation aims to develop novel models for combining agents’ subjective and objective preferences, information, and responses to queries. Dimension 2: Aggregation aims to introduce novel efficiency and fairness criteria for informed group decision making, and design novel mechanisms to achieve them for truthful, cooperative agents. Dimension 3: Incentives aims to address agents’ incentives in informed group decision making by proposing novel equilibrium concepts, conducting analysis of agents’ behavior, and designing novel incentive-aware mechanisms. To bridge theory and practice, the models, algorithms, and mechanisms developed in this project will be deployed, validated, and refined at the open-source Online Preference Reporting and Aggregation (OPRA) system via various educational and outreach activities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.