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：本文开创性地采用认知方法（epistemic approach）研究参与式预算中的投票规则，即将选票视为关于客观最优项目集之真实情况的含噪反映。运用该方法，我们首先证明：无论是文献中最常研究的规则，还是实际应用最广泛的规则，均无法基于认知合理性得到辩护——无论我们对投票者的准确度作何假设，这些规则均无法被解释为最大似然估计量。进一步聚焦于福利最大化规则时，我们在认知保证方面同时获得了正面与负面结论。