An experimental study of a web-based framework for group decision support with applications to participatory budget elaboration

摘要

Owing to the increasing demand for citizen participation in public decision processes, participatory budgets are becoming increasingly popular in many municipalities. Because there is little methodology available for this type of activity and because information and communications technologies are scarcely used, we describe a prototype of a web-based decision support tool for participatory budget problems. We implement a framework designed to support non-sophisticated users and develop a user-friendly, yet rigorous, participatory group preference modelling method. The framework is based on the interactive Pareto frontier visualisation, expression of preferences in terms of goals and goal-based arbitration. We describe an experiment we have run with an example participatory budget problem.