Research Paper#Fair Committee Selection, Algorithm Design, Ordinal Preferences, Distortion🔬 ResearchAnalyzed: Jan 3, 2026 09:20
Fair Committee Selection with Limited Cardinal Information
Published:Dec 31, 2025 15:47
•1 min read
•ArXiv
Analysis
This paper addresses the problem of fair committee selection, a relevant issue in various real-world scenarios. It focuses on the challenge of aggregating preferences when only ordinal (ranking) information is available, which is a common limitation. The paper's contribution lies in developing algorithms that achieve good performance (low distortion) with limited access to cardinal (distance) information, overcoming the inherent hardness of the problem. The focus on fairness constraints and the use of distortion as a performance metric make the research practically relevant.
Key Takeaways
- •Addresses the problem of fair committee selection under ordinal preferences.
- •Overcomes the hardness of the problem by allowing limited access to cardinal information.
- •Presents a factor-5 distortion algorithm with O(k log^2 k) queries.
- •Provides an improved factor-3 distortion algorithm using O(k^2) queries.
Reference
“The main contribution is a factor-$5$ distortion algorithm that requires only $O(k \log^2 k)$ queries.”