(New) Patrick Lederer wins Distinguished Paper Award at International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 2026

We are pleased to report that Patrick Lederer, postdoc in the Computational Social Choice Group at the ILLC, and his coauthors received a Distinguished Paper Award at the 35th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), held in Bremen, Germany, this August. It was one of three distinguished papers, selected from over 5,000 submissions to the conference. Congratulations!

Patrick's work concerns the problem of designing a good budget allocation rule that can be used to decide how much of a common budget to assign to each of several projects, based on the preferences reported by a number of individuals. While it is known to be mathematically impossible to design a rule that meets all of the criteria one might look for in such a setting—such as being fair to individuals and incentivising them to report their own preferences truthfully—the paper shows that surprisingly positive results are within reach if we are willing to slightly relax the requirement of incentivising truthfulness. Specifically, it turns out that there in fact are good rules that do not disincentivise misreporting of preferences entirely but that instead bound the benefits anyone might reap from misreporting.

A preprint of Patrick's paper, entitled "Approximate Strategyproofness in Approval-Based Budget Division", is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11736.