IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/2508.08810.html

Not in My Backyard! Temporal Voting Over Public Chores

Author

Listed:
  • Edith Elkind
  • Tzeh Yuan Neoh
  • Nicholas Teh

Abstract

We study a temporal voting model where voters have dynamic preferences over a set of public chores -- projects that benefit society, but impose individual costs on those affected by their implementation. We investigate the computational complexity of optimizing utilitarian and egalitarian welfare. Our results show that while optimizing the former is computationally straightforward, minimizing the latter is computationally intractable, even in very restricted cases. Nevertheless, we identify several settings where this problem can be solved efficiently, either exactly or by an approximation algorithm. We also examine the effects of enforcing temporal fairness and its impact on social welfare, and analyze the competitive ratio of online algorithms. We then explore the strategic behavior of agents, providing insights into potential malfeasance in such decision-making environments. Finally, we discuss a range of fairness measures and their suitability for our setting.

Suggested Citation

  • Edith Elkind & Tzeh Yuan Neoh & Nicholas Teh, 2025. "Not in My Backyard! Temporal Voting Over Public Chores," Papers 2508.08810, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2508.08810
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08810
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Suksompong, Warut & Teh, Nicholas, 2022. "On maximum weighted Nash welfare for binary valuations," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 101-108.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Suksompong, Warut & Teh, Nicholas, 2023. "Weighted fair division with matroid-rank valuations: Monotonicity and strategyproofness," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 126(C), pages 48-59.
    2. Warut Suksompong & Nicholas Teh, 2023. "Weighted Fair Division with Matroid-Rank Valuations: Monotonicity and Strategyproofness," Papers 2303.14454, arXiv.org, revised Sep 2023.
    3. Luisa Montanari & Ulrike Schmidt-Kraepelin & Warut Suksompong & Nicholas Teh, 2025. "Weighted envy-freeness for submodular valuations," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 65(4), pages 983-1016, December.
    4. Jonathan Scarlett & Nicholas Teh & Yair Zick, 2023. "For One and All: Individual and Group Fairness in the Allocation of Indivisible Goods," Papers 2302.06958, arXiv.org.
    5. Tzeh Yuan Neoh & Nicholas Teh, 2025. "Understanding EFX Allocations: Counting and Variants," Papers 2504.03951, arXiv.org.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2508.08810. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.