What Are People's Actual Utility Functions in Budget Aggregation?
For researchers designing budget aggregation mechanisms, this work provides empirical evidence that standard utility models are inadequate, highlighting the need for more flexible models.
The paper empirically tests human utility functions in budget aggregation, finding that standard models (ℓ1, ℓ2, Leontief) fail to capture preferences, while more general properties (star-shaped, multi-dimensional single-peaked, peak-linear) are supported. Most participants exhibit asymmetries in gains vs. losses and across issues.
Budget aggregation is a process in which citizens vote by declaring their individual ideal budget allocation, and a pre-determined rule aggregates all votes into a single outcome. Recent theoretical work has proposed various aggregation rules, along with impossibility results for satisfying desirable axioms simultaneously. These analyses rely on assumptions about how voters evaluate non-ideal allocations, yet such assumptions have not been empirically validated on human subjects. We present a framework for empirically testing hypotheses about human utility functions using simple pairwise comparisons. We introduce a modular, open-source polling system that, after eliciting a subject's ideal allocation, presents carefully generated pairs of non-ideal alternatives. Different pair-generation algorithms allow testing various properties of utility functions. Using this framework, we conduct polls with hundreds of participants. The results show that standard utility models, including $\ell_1$, $\ell_2$, and Leontief, fail to capture human preferences, as very few participants behave consistently with any single model. In contrast, we find strong empirical support for more general properties, such as star-shaped, multi-dimensional single-peaked, and peak-linear preferences. We also find that most participants exhibit asymmetries both with respect to sign (gains vs. losses) and issue, contradicting any utility model based on an $\ell_p$ metric. These findings suggest that developing practical budget-aggregation mechanisms requires more flexible models of human utility functions.