Indivisible Participatory Budgeting with Multiple Degrees of Sophistication of Projects

Indivisible participatory budgeting (PB) is a framework that aggregates the preferences of voters to decide the distribution of budget among a set of projects. The existing literature assumes that each project has only one possible cost. In this work, we let each project have a set of permissible costs, each reflecting a possible degree of sophistication of the project. Each voter approves a range of costs for each project, by giving an upper and lower bound on the cost that she thinks the project deserves. We prove that the existing positive results can also be extended to our framework where a project has several permissible costs, and also present new computational and axiomatic results.