Not in My Backyard! Temporal Voting Over Public Chores
Not in My Backyard! Temporal Voting Over Public Chores
Edith Elkind, Tzeh Yuan Neoh, Nicholas Teh
Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 3814-3820.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/424
We study a temporal voting model where voters have dynamic preferences over a set of public chores---projects that benefit society, but impose individual costs on those affected by their implementation. We investigate the computational complexity of optimizing utilitarian and egalitarian welfare. Our results show that while optimizing the former is computationally straightforward, minimizing the latter is computationally intractable, even in very restricted cases. Nevertheless, we identify several settings where this problem can be solved efficiently, either exactly or by an approximation algorithm. We also examine the effects of enforcing temporal fairness and its impact on social welfare, and analyze the competitive ratio of online algorithms. We then explore the strategic behavior of agents, providing insights into potential malfeasance in such decision-making environments. Finally, we discuss a range of fairness measures and their suitability for our setting.
Keywords:
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Computational social choice
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Fair division
