Randomly Selected Representative Committees

Abstract

There are many real-world examples where decisions are made by a committee rather than all of the members of a court, legislature, or other body. The members of such committees are usually chosen either using random selection or using direct selection by a designated authority. However, neither of these methods satisfies both of the lodestar principles that each member of the body has an equal opportunity of being selected to serve on each committee and that the collective view of each committee is representative of the collective view of all of the members of the body. We present a new committee selection method that has the core benefits of random selection (equal opportunity) and direct selection (the possibility of representativeness) while avoiding their pitfalls. This new method consists of creating a pool of “average” committees in which each member of the body serves on the same number of committees included in the pool, and then randomly selecting a committee from the pool.

Keywords: Representative Committee, Panel Assignment, Random Selection, Outlier Panel