Technical Reports on Statistics and Decision Sciences

In part due to the increasing demand for citizen participation in public decision processes, participatory budgets are becoming increasingly popular in many municipalities. As there is little methodology available for this type of activities and Information Technologies are scarcely used in them, 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 userfriendly, yet rigorous, participatory group decision support method. The framework is based on interactive Pareto frontier visualization, expression of preferences in terms of goals and goal-based arbitration. We apply it to participatory budget elaboration, viewed as a resource assignment problem in which citizens attempt to maximize group satisfaction in view of multiple criteria, subject to, possibly, other constraints. We describe an experiment we have run with our web tool with an example participatory budget problem.