Designing Committees for Mitigating Biases
Abstract
It is widely observed that individuals prefer to interact with
others who are more similar to them (this phenomenon is
termed homophily). This similarity manifests itself in various
ways such as beliefs, values and education. Thus, it should
not come as a surprise that when people make hiring choices,
for example, their similarity to the candidate plays a role in
their choice. In this paper, we suggest that putting the decision in the hands of a committee instead of a single person
can reduce this bias.
We study a novel model of voting in which a committee of experts is constructed to reduce the biases of its members. We
first present voting rules that optimally reduce the biases of a
given committee. Our main results include the design of committees, for several settings, that are able to reach a nearly optimal (unbiased) choice. We also provide a thorough analysis
of the trade-offs between the committee size and the obtained
error. Our model is inherently different from the well-studied
models of voting that focus on aggregation of preferences or
on aggregation of information due to the introduction of similarity biases.
Research Areas
