Fair Allocation Problems in Reviewer Assignment

Peer review is an incredibly important and revered process for establishing scientific rigor and facilitating effective discourse. However, many conventions of this process are ad-hoc and could benefit heavily from a more intentional design. I present our existing work applying fair allocation techniques to a major problem in peer review, the assignment of reviewers. We propose a simple but flexible algorithm for fair reviewer assignment, based on the classic Round Robin picking sequence. In addition, I discuss two other areas in peer review that are ripe for fair allocation and mechanism design, reviewer bidding and two-sided fair reviewer assignment.