10 November 2022, Computational Social Choice Seminar, Marion Collewet

Abstract

This paper presents a new method to elicit and aggregate preferences of citizens over public projects. The method consists of letting citizens allocate a limited public budget across public projects in a choice experiment (Participatory Value Evaluation). Cardinal utilities are estimated from this choice experiment, and aggregated to evaluate a social welfare function. We argue that aggregating utilities is possible because the measure of utility we aggregate is made comparable across individuals by the experimental setting. We argue that aggregating utilities is desirable because it takes into account different marginal utilities of income and fairness considerations of citizens.

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