Budget-feasible Mechanisms for Representing Groups of Agents Proportionally

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the problem of designing budget-feasible mechanisms for selecting agents with private costs from various groups to ensure proportional representation, where the minimum proportion of the selected agents from each group is maximized. Depending on agents' membership in the groups, we consider two main models: single group setting where each agent belongs to only one group, and multiple group setting where each agent may belong to multiple groups. We propose novel budget-feasible proportion-representative mechanisms for these models, which can select representative agents from different groups. The proposed mechanisms guarantee theoretical properties of individual rationality, budget-feasibility, truthfulness, and approximation performance on proportional representation.