Participatory Funding Coordination: Model, Axioms and Rules

Abstract: We present a new model of collective decision making that captures important crowd-funding and donor coordination scenarios. In the setting, there is a set of projects (each with its own cost) and a set of agents (that have their budgets as well as preferences over the projects). An outcome is a set of projects that are funded along with the specific contributions made by the agents. For the model, we identify meaningful axioms that capture concerns including fairness, efficiency, and participation incentives. We then propose desirable rules for the model and study, which sets of axioms can be satisfied simultaneously. An experimental study indicates the relative performance of different rules as well as the price of enforcing fairness axioms.