The Conference Paper Assignment Problem: Using Order Weighted Averages to Assign Indivisible Goods
This addresses the practical problem of efficiently allocating papers to reviewers for academic conferences, with incremental contributions to assignment algorithms in computer science and economics.
The paper tackles the conference paper assignment problem by proposing a novel mechanism using order weighted averages (OWAs) to assign papers to reviewers with capacity constraints, showing a polynomial-time algorithm for finding a Σ-OWA assignment compared to the NP-hardness of egalitarian assignments.
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 $Σ$-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.