Societal Impact of Computational Social Choice (Dagstuhl Seminar 25401)

Abstract

Computational Social Choice (COMSOC) is an interdisciplinary field between social choice theory in economics and theoretical computer science. The focus is to study algorithms for collective decision-making problems, such as political elections, the allocation of resources, and so on. In this Dagstuhl Seminar "Societal Impact of Computational Social Choice" (25401), we focused on three main topics. The first one was data, which has become an essential element for COMSOC research. In fact, thanks to the availability of open libraries, datasets and tools, researchers can now implement and test their algorithms for collective decision-making on real-life data, complementing their theoretical results. The second one was participation, as in recent years many municipalities and public institutions have moved towards various forms of participatory and digital democracy, with the goal of increasing the citizens' engagement in the public life of their communities. The third one was time, as although many collective decision-making problems have an underlying repeated nature, this dimension had thus far not received the deserved attention within standard COMSOC models. We addressed these topics under the two overarching themes of domain restrictions and societal impact: while domain restrictions can be seen as a methodological question over the input of our problems, societal impact can be seen as part of their output, i.e., the applications originating from theoretical research.