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Nisarg Shah

32 accepted papers

2025

The Distortion of Public-Spirited Participatory Budgeting

AAAI 2025technical

Participatory budgeting (PB) is an increasingly popular tool for democratically allocating limited budgets to public-good projects. In PB, constituents vote on their preferred projects via ballots, and then an aggregation rule selects a set of projects whose total cost fits within the budget. Recent…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2023

Explainable and Efficient Randomized Voting Rules

NeurIPS 2023poster

With a rapid growth in the deployment of AI tools for making critical decisions (or aiding humans in doing so), there is a growing demand to be able to explain to the stakeholders how these tools arrive at a decision. Consequently, voting is frequently used to make such decisions due to its inherent…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2023

Proportionally Fair Online Allocation of Public Goods with Predictions

IJCAI 2023poster

We design online algorithms for fair allocation of public goods to a set of N agents over a sequence of T rounds and focus on improving their performance using predictions. In the basic model, a public good arrives in each round, and every agent reveals their value for it upon arrival. The algorithm…

Cited by 24SourcePDFScholar
2022

Is Sortition Both Representative and Fair?

NeurIPS 2022accept

Sortition is a form of democracy built on random selection of representatives. Two of the key arguments in favor of sortition are that it provides representation (a random panel reflects the composition of the population) and fairness (everyone has a chance to participate). Uniformly random selectio…

Cited by 18SourcePDFScholar
2021

Aggregating Binary Judgments Ranked by Accuracy

AAAI 2021technical

We revisit the fundamental problem of predicting a binary ground truth based on independent binary judgments provided by experts. When the accuracy levels of the experts are known, the problem can be solved easily through maximum likelihood estimation. We consider, however, a setting in which we are…

2021

Distortion in Social Choice Problems: The First 15 Years and Beyond

IJCAI 2021poster

The notion of distortion in social choice problems has been defined to measure the loss in efficiency---typically measured by the utilitarian social welfare, the sum of utilities of the participating agents---due to having access only to limited information about the preferences of the agents. We su…

Cited by 103SourcePDFScholar
2021

Market-Based Explanations of Collective Decisions

AAAI 2021technical

We consider approval-based committee elections, in which a size-k subset of available candidates must be selected given approval sets for each voter, indicating the candidates approved by the voter. A number of axioms capturing ideas of fairness and proportionality have been proposed for this framew…

Cited by 29SourcePDFScholar
2021

Surprisingly Popular Voting Recovers Rankings, Surprisingly!

IJCAI 2021poster

The wisdom of the crowd has long become the de facto approach for eliciting information from individuals or experts in order to predict the ground truth. However, classical democratic approaches for aggregating individual \emph{votes} only work when the opinion of the majority of the crowd is relati…

Cited by 18SourcePDFScholar
2019

Efficient and Thrifty Voting by Any Means Necessary

NeurIPS 2019oral

We take an unorthodox view of voting by expanding the design space to include both the elicitation rule, whereby voters map their (cardinal) preferences to votes, and the aggregation rule, which transforms the reported votes into collective decisions. Intuitively, there is a tradeoff between the com…

Cited by 62SourcePDFScholar