Dr. Sujit Gujar and his students Sankarshan Damle and Manisha Padala presented a paper on Combinatorial Civic Crowdfunding with Budgeted Agents: Welfare Optimality at Equilibrium and Optimal Deviation at the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2023) held at Washington DC from 7 – 14 February.
Here the summary of the paper as explained by the authors:
Civic Crowdfunding (CC) uses the “power of the crowd” to garner contributions towards public projects. As these projects are non-excludable, agents may prefer to “free-ride,” resulting in the project not being funded. For single project CC, researchers propose to provide refunds to incentivize agents to contribute, thereby guaranteeing the project’s funding. These funding guarantees are applicable only when agents have an unlimited budget. This work focuses on a combinatorial setting, where multiple projects are available for CC and agents have a limited budget. We study certain specific conditions where funding can be guaranteed. Further, funding the optimal social welfare subset of projects is desirable when every available project cannot be funded due to budget restrictions. We prove the impossibility of achieving optimal welfare at equilibrium for any monotone refund scheme. We then study different heuristics that the agents can use to contribute to the projects in practice. Through simulations, we demonstrate the heuristics’ performance as the average-case trade-off between welfare obtained and agent utility.
Full paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.13941
The purpose of the AAAI conference series is to promote research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and foster scientific exchange between researchers, practitioners, scientists, students, and engineers across the entirety of AI and its affiliated disciplines. The theme of the AAAI-23 conference was to create collaborative bridges within and beyond AI. Like previous AAAI conferences, AAAI-23 featured technical paper presentations, special tracks, invited speakers, workshops, tutorials, poster sessions, senior member presentations, competitions, and exhibit programs, and two new activities: a Bridge Program and a Lab Program. Many of these activities were tailored to the theme of bridges and all were selected according to the highest standards, with additional programs for students and young researchers.
Conference page: https://aaai-23.aaai.org/