On Strategyproof Conference Peer Review
This addresses fairness and integrity issues in academic peer review for conferences like ICLR, though it is incremental as it builds on existing partitioning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of strategic reviews in conference peer review due to reviewer-author overlap by proposing a theoretical framework for strategyproof and efficient peer review, showing an algorithm guarantees strategyproofness and unanimity under a property satisfied in ICLR data and proving impossibility results under stronger requirements.
We consider peer review in a conference setting where there is typically an overlap between the set of reviewers and the set of authors. This overlap can incentivize strategic reviews to influence the final ranking of one's own papers. In this work, we address this problem through the lens of social choice, and present a theoretical framework for strategyproof and efficient peer review. We first present and analyze an algorithm for reviewer-assignment and aggregation that guarantees strategyproofness and a natural efficiency property called unanimity, when the authorship graph satisfies a simple property. Our algorithm is based on the so-called partitioning method, and can be thought as a generalization of this method to conference peer review settings. We then empirically show that the requisite property on the authorship graph is indeed satisfied in the submission data from the ICLR conference, and further demonstrate a simple trick to make the partitioning method more practically appealing for conference peer review. Finally, we complement our positive results with negative theoretical results where we prove that under various ways of strengthening the requirements, it is impossible for any algorithm to be strategyproof and efficient.