We present a strategy-proof public goods budgeting mechanism where agents determine both the total volume of expanses and the specific allocation. It is constructed as a modification of VCG to a non-typical environment, namely where we do not assume quasi-linear utilities nor direct revelation. We further show that under plausible assumptions it satisfies strategyproofness in strictly dominant strategies, and consequently implements the social optimum as a Coalition-Proof Nash Equilibrium. A primary (albeit not an exclusive) motivation of our model is Participatory Budgeting, where members of a community collectively decide the spending policy of public tax dollars. While incentives alignment in our mechanism, as in classic VCG, is achieved via individual payments we charge from agents, in a PB context that seems unreasonable. Our second main result thus provides that, under further specifications relevant in that context, these payments will vanish in large populations. In the last section we expand the mechanism’s definition to a class of mechanisms in which the designer can prioritize certain outcomes she sees as desirable. In particular we give the example of favoring equitable/egalitarian allocations.

In this paper, we first present a linear programming based approach for modeling and solving the resource matching problem in grid environments with heterogeneous resources. The resource matching problem described takes into account resource sharing, job priorities, dependencies on multiple resource types, and resource specific policies. We then propose Web service style architecture for online matching of independent jobs with resources in a grid environment and describe a prototype implementation. Our preliminary performance results indicate that the linear programming based approach for resource matching is efficient in speed and accuracy and can keep up with high job arrival rates of an important criterion for online resource matching systems. Also, the Web service style architecture makes the system scalable and extendable. It can also be integrated with other existing grid services in a straightforward manner.