Near-Optimal Reviewer Splitting in Two-Phase Paper Reviewing and Conference Experiment Design

Many scientific conferences employ a two-phase paper review process, where some papers are assigned additional reviewers after the initial reviews are submitted. Many conferences also design and run experiments on their paper review process, where some papers are assigned reviewers who provide reviews under an experimental condition. In this paper, we consider the question: how should reviewers be divided between phases or conditions in order to maximize total assignment similarity? We show both empirically (on real conference data) and theoretically (under certain natural conditions) that dividing reviewers uniformly at random is near-optimal. The full paper is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.06371.