English

The Conference Paper Assignment Problem: Using Order Weighted Averages to Assign Indivisible Goods

Artificial Intelligence 2017-05-22 v1 Computer Science and Game Theory Multiagent Systems

Abstract

Motivated by the common academic problem of allocating papers to referees for conference reviewing we propose a novel mechanism for solving the assignment problem when we have a two sided matching problem with preferences from one side (the agents/reviewers) over the other side (the objects/papers) and both sides have capacity constraints. The assignment problem is a fundamental problem in both computer science and economics with application in many areas including task and resource allocation. We draw inspiration from multi-criteria decision making and voting and use order weighted averages (OWAs) to propose a novel and flexible class of algorithms for the assignment problem. We show an algorithm for finding a Σ\Sigma-OWA assignment in polynomial time, in contrast to the NP-hardness of finding an egalitarian assignment. Inspired by this setting we observe an interesting connection between our model and the classic proportional multi-winner election problem in social choice.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1705.06840,
  title  = {The Conference Paper Assignment Problem: Using Order Weighted Averages to Assign Indivisible Goods},
  author = {Jing Wu Lian and Nicholas Mattei and Renee Noble and Toby Walsh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.06840},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

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R2 v1 2026-06-22T19:52:05.751Z