Arbiter assignment

In dispute resolution, arbitrator assignments are decentralized and they incorporate parties’ preferences, in total contrast to referee assignments in sports. We suggest that there can be gains (i) in dispute resolution from centralizing the allocation by bundling the newly arriving cases, and (ii) in sports from incorporating teams’ preferences. To that end, we introduce a class of Arbiter Assignment Problems where a set of matches (e.g., disputes or games), each made up of two agents, are to be assigned arbiters (e.g., arbitrators or referees). In this new set of problems, the question of how agents in a match should compromise becomes critical. To evaluate the value of an arbiter for a match, we introduce the (Rawlsian) notion of depth, defined as the arbiter’s worst position in the two agents’ rankings. Depth optimal assignments minimize depth over matches, and they are Pareto optimal. We first introduce and analyze depth optimal (and fair) mechanisms. We then propose and study strategy-proof mechanisms.