Platforms and algorithms for decision making at scale
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The Internet is strengthening democracy by empowering individuals. Social media enables real-time dissemination of information. Online social networks enable people to come together in support of common causes. But despite the prevalence of Internet technologies, there has yet to be an online platform where large-scale democratic decision making occurs regularly as a society. Multiple obstacles remain in the way of building such platforms. For example, places where users can exercise free-form speech often degenerate into vitriol. The unstructured, large-scale nature of the Internet means that it is not obvious what the optimal way to aggregate opinions is and how to act on them. In this dissertation, we discuss our work on building platforms that tackle these issues from theoretical and practical perspectives. Specifically, - Participatory Budgeting (PB): PB is a democratic process where citizens vote on public budgets. We propose Knapsack Voting, a vote aggregation method in PB, and show that it is welfare-maximizing and strategy-proof under certain utility models. We also discuss the Participatory Budgeting Platform (pbstanford.org), our open-source platform for running online PB elections. It has been used throughout the United States, including Chicago, Boston, Seattle, and New York City, and has distributed over 60 million of public budgets. - Sequential Deliberation: Sequential deliberation is a vote aggregation method that uses rounds of small group interaction and can be used in decision spaces that are too complex for ordinal voting. We show that this method converges to the optimal point quickly under certain utility models. We also show how sequential deliberation can be used in PB to handle project interdependencies. - Online Deliberation Platform: We discuss our platform for conducting large-scale Deliberative Polls with an automated moderator that can support over 1,000 simultaneous participants (stanforddeliberate.org). The platform has been successfully deployed in the US, Canada, Chile, Hong Kong, and Japan, where people deliberated on complex issues such as health care, renewable energy, and foreign policy. We discuss the technical challenges and our study on the efficiency of the platform.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2021; ©2021 |
| Publication date | 2021; 2021 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Sakshuwong, Sukolsak |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Goel, Ashish |
| Thesis advisor | Goel, Ashish |
| Thesis advisor | Ashlagi, Itai |
| Thesis advisor | Fishkin, James S |
| Degree committee member | Ashlagi, Itai |
| Degree committee member | Fishkin, James S |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Management Science and Engineering |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Sukolsak Sakshuwong. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Management Science & Engineering. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2021. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/ys577qk2513 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2021 by Sukolsak Sakshuwong
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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