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Combinatorial participatory budgeting
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<p> Combinatorial participatory budgeting, also called indivisible participatory budgeting or budgeted social choice, is a problem in <a href="/facts/Social_choice/ztMqy1bM">social choice</a>. There are several candidate <i>projects</i>, each of which has a fixed costs. There is a fixed <i>budget</i>, that cannot cover all these projects. Each voter has different <i>preferences</i> regarding these projects. The goal is to find a <i>budget-allocation</i> - a subset of the projects, with total cost at most the budget, that will be funded. Combinatorial participatory budgeting is the most common form of <a href="/facts/Participatory_budgeting/7c7yPe0X">participatory budgeting</a>. </p><p>Combinatorial PB can be seen as a generalization of <a href="/facts/Committee_voting/rBgqbo6b">committee voting</a>: committee voting is a special case of PB in which the "cost" of each candidate is 1, and the "budget" is the committee size. This assumption is often called the <i>unit-cost assumption</i>. The setting in which the projects are divisible (can receive any amount of money) is called portioning, <a href="/facts/Fractional_social_choice/LwjH3CVm">fractional social choice</a>, or <a href="/facts/Budget-proposal_aggregation/YLpJPtQc">budget-proposal aggregation</a>. </p><p>PB rules have other applications besides proper budgeting. For example: </p> <ul><li>Selecting validators in consensus protocols, such as the <a href="/facts/Blockchain/8H43GgWy">blockchain</a>;</li> <li>Selecting web pages that should be displayed in response to user queries;</li> <li><a href="/facts/Optimal_facility_location/ssbU6ww2">Locating public facilities</a>;</li> <li>Improving the quality of genetic algorithms.</li></ul>