Coordinating Charitable Donations

A new trend in social choice theory and fair division is to study how money should be spent on public interest projects based on the preferences of multiple agents. In contrast to the standard model of participatory budgeting, this talk focuses on settings where (i) public projects are not associated with fixed costs and (ii) the budget to be distributed is supplied by the agents themselves. An important application of this setting is donor coordination. Here, the agents are donors willing to contribute money for charitable giving, the public projects are charitable organizations, and the donors have preferences over how money should be distributed among charities. I will present recent results in this stream of research, discussing various types of utility functions and illuminating the pervasive conflict between efficiency, strategyproofness, and fairness.

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Felix Brandt

Felix Brandt is a Professor for Algorithmic Game Theory in the School of Computation, Information and Technology at the Technical University of Munich. Prior to this appointment, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University and an Emmy Noether Junior Research Group Leader at Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich. He is a Co-Editor of Social Choice and Welfare and a former Co-Editor of Games and Economic Behavior. His research explores fundamental challenges that emerge when multiple self-interested entities, known as agents, interact. These challenges include modeling preferences over uncertain outcomes, analyzing optimal rational behavior, and studying mechanisms that allow agents to aggregate their individual preferences—such as voting systems or allocation rules. His work addresses formally provable statements within rigorous frameworks, drawing on tools from mathematics, economics, and computer science.