Fair budgets from ranked ballots: PB-EAR
How do you split a shared budget fairly when people rank projects that cost very different amounts? PB-EAR, from our AAAI 2021 paper Proportionally Representative Participatory Budgeting with Ordinal Preferences ( AAAI version ), gives every voter an equal slice of the budget and lets groups pool their slices to fund the projects they rank highest, looking further down the ballots only when nothing is yet affordable. Every cohesive group is guaranteed its proportional share, and the rule extends our Expanding Approvals Rule for elections to budgets with project costs, ties and unequal voter weights. That makes it a natural fit for DAO grant rounds such as TheDAO Security Fund 's ETHSecurity Initiatives, where badge holders will rank the security initiatives listed on the app to allocate the fund's budget. The two-minute video below walks through a worked example. Here's an educational tool someone built to show how PB-EAR works.