Collaborative Research: RI: Medium: Informed, Fair, Efficient, and Incentive-Aware Group Decision Making

In our fast-paced and increasingly online world making fair, equitable, and informed decisions is both more important and harder than ever. In situations where a group must come to a consensus, in the presence of varied and rapidly changing information, achieving fairness and equity becomes even more difficult. In response, this project will combine research from social choice theory and information elicitation to create a new research direction called informed group decision making. This new research area extends current models and mechanisms of group decision making by explicitly accounting for the role that information has on agents' final decisions. The final goal is to develop new models and methods that can be used to incentivize individuals to ensure group decisions achieve a desired outcome. This research promises cross-institutional, educational, and societal impacts and will broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in computing research, train highly qualified professionals, and engage students from underrepresented groups to pursue studies in computing-related fields. This research consists of three dimensions for foundational research and one direction for bridging theory and practice. Dimension 1: Representation aims to develop novel models for combining agents’ subjective and objective preferences, information, and responses to queries. Dimension 2: Aggregation aims to introduce novel efficiency and fairness criteria for informed group decision making, and design novel mechanisms to achieve them for truthful, cooperative agents. Dimension 3: Incentives aims to address agents’ incentives in informed group decision making by proposing novel equilibrium concepts, conducting analysis of agents’ behavior, and designing novel incentive-aware mechanisms. To bridge theory and practice, the models, algorithms, and mechanisms developed in this project will be deployed, validated, and refined at the open-source Online Preference Reporting and Aggregation (OPRA) system via various educational and outreach activities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.