We address the question of aggregating the preferences of voters in the context of participatory budgeting. We scrutinize the voting method currently used in practice, underline its drawbacks, and introduce a novel scheme tailored to this setting, which we call “Knapsack Voting”. We study its strategic properties we show that it is strategy-proof under a natural model of utility (a dis-utility ...

The performance of public organizations is one of the key topics in public administration research. Cost-effectiveness as a dimension of performance has hardly been studied in this literature, however. Many governments currently are cutting budgets on an unprecedented scale after the world-wide financial and economic crisis. Reducing budgets and at the same time safeguarding the level of essent...

We address the question of aggregating the preferences of voters in the context of participatory budgeting. We scrutinize the voting method currently used in practice, underline its drawbacks, and introduce a novel scheme tailored to this setting, which we call “Knapsack Voting”. We study its strategic properties we show that it is strategy-proof under a natural model of utility (a dis-utility ...

HE objective of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of an Activity Based Costing (ABC) model in predicting aggregate budgeted cost for the utilities department in a local government. In the past few years, there has been a pressure on the city officials to reduce the costs. This is forcing cities to re-examine their current allocation of resources to various activities. We examine th...

Citizen participation in the governance process is widely encouraged by academics and professional organizations and is a popular conference topic. Key public policy decisions are made during the public budgeting process, so this would appear to be an important opportunity for meaningful citizen participation. Yet little is known about how and when citizens are involved in the budget process.1