Proceedings

Discrete Budget Aggregation: Truthfulness and Proportionality

Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin, Warut Suksompong, Markus Utke

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Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Main Track. Pages 4040-4047.

https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/450

Keywords

  • Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Mechanism design
  • Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Computational social choice

Abstract

We study a budget aggregation setting where voters express their preferred allocation of a fixed budget over a set of alternatives, and a mechanism aggregates these preferences into a single output allocation. Motivated by scenarios in which the budget is not perfectly divisible, we depart from the prevailing literature by restricting the mechanism to output allocations that assign integral amounts. This seemingly minor deviation has significant implications for the existence of truthful mechanisms. Specifically, when voters can propose fractional allocations, we demonstrate that the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem can be extended to our setting. In contrast, when voters are restricted to integral ballots, we identify a class of truthful mechanisms by adapting moving-phantom mechanisms to our context. Finally, we show that while a weak form of proportionality can be achieved alongside truthfulness, stronger proportionality notions derived from approval-based committee voting are incompatible with truthfulness.

Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin, Warut Suksompong, and Markus Utke. 2025. Discrete Budget Aggregation: Truthfulness and Proportionality. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-25. IJCAI, 4040–4047. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/450
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