Tournament Method Using a Tree Structure to Resolve Budget Conflicts

Many local governments in Japan lack a decision-making protocol for resolving budget conflicts. They often use a method in which the budget allocation essentially follows that of the previous allocation. However, this method is not reliable for adapting to present situations and also results in sectarianism. The governments have been looking for alternatives as no dominant method currently exists. We propose a method for budget allocation that uses a tree structure. This method considers the trade-off between costs and efficiency. The number of assessments required for determining a budget allocation is at least the number of objects for allocation; thus, the method minimizes costs. Furthermore, each section manager is directly responsible for the budget ratios of all of the projects in their own section, so this procedure may alleviate the dissatisfaction of stakeholders. Moreover, this method avoids factitive assessments by prohibiting the choice of a representative project. Our method follows a tournament style which will be expanded on in a future work.