Online Approval Committee Elections
This addresses the challenge of fair and efficient online committee elections for groups needing real-time decision-making, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing voting and secretary problem frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of selecting a committee of k candidates online as they appear, using approval voting, and assesses the extent to which such committees can proportionally represent voters while also showing how to compute committees with maximal expected score when prior probability over candidate approvals is available.
Assume $k$ candidates need to be selected. The candidates appear over time. Each time one appears, it must be immediately selected or rejected -- a decision that is made by a group of individuals through voting. Assume the voters use approval ballots, i.e., for each candidate they only specify whether they consider it acceptable or not. This setting can be seen as a voting variant of choosing $k$ secretaries. Our contribution is twofold. (1) We assess to what extent the committees that are computed online can proportionally represent the voters. (2) If a prior probability over candidate approvals is available, we show how to compute committees with maximal expected score.