We initiate the study of voting rules for participatory budgeting using the so-called epistemic approach, where one interprets votes as noisy reflections of some ground truth regarding the objectively best set of projects to fund. Using this approach, we first show that both the most studied rules in the literature and the most widely used rule in practice cannot be justified on epistemic grounds: they cannot be interpreted as maximum likelihood estimators, whatever assumptions we make about the accuracy of voters. Focusing then on welfare-maximising rules, we obtain both positive and negative results regarding epistemic guarantees.

翻译：我们首次采用所谓认知方法研究参与式预算的投票规则，其中将选票解读为关于客观最佳项目集这一基本事实的噪声反映。通过此方法，我们首先证明，无论在何种关于选民准确性的假设下，文献中研究最深入的规则和实践中应用最广泛的规则均无法从认知角度得到辩护：它们无法被解释为最大似然估计量。进而聚焦于福利最大化规则，我们在认知保证方面得到了正反两方面结果。