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

YouTube作为娱乐频道与好莱坞竞争，同时也通过充当分发机制来补充好莱坞。Twitter与新闻媒体的关系类似，Coursera与大学的关系也类似。但作为一个社会，没有在线替代方案来大规模地做出民主决策。与建立共识和妥协相反，公共讨论委员会在处理有争议的社会政治问题时往往会陷入火药战。该项目旨在开发大规模协作决策的算法和平台。这些平台将部署在真正的决策过程中，产生巨大的广泛影响。大部分工作将通过参与式预算编制来提供信息，一群用户集体编制预算。由于预算约束可以建模为凸约束，因此参与式预算的见解将应用于更一般的凸决策空间。在算法方面，私人投资机构建议开发超越简单投票的协商一致的算法和机制。在复杂的决策空间中，对一组候选人进行排名的正常投票方法被打破，我们需要新的机制。例如，对于参与式预算，用户可能被要求解决背包问题，提供完整的预算。这导致了激励相容、观点动态、公平性和凸优化方面令人兴奋的方向。事实上，PI认为这是社会选择理论演变的自然下一步，将代表着算法和机制设计方面的重大智力进步。在实验和评估方面，这项工作将采用由Co-Pi Fishkin开发的审议投票方法，并设计工具将其扩展到参与性预算编制。该项目还将评估思考性民意调查如何扩大到大型在线社区。这是协商民主演变的自然下一步。在部署方面，这个项目将促进我们对如何设计讨论、协作和投票的界面的理解，从而导致对复杂问题的真正审议和共识，而不是像许多讨论板和评论帖子那样沦为刻薄之词。

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.