Smooth Partial Lotteries for Stable Randomized Selection
Competitive selection processes, from scientific funding to admissions and hiring, use evaluations to score candidates, and eventually choose a subset of them based on those scores. Recently, many organizations have adopted partial lotteries, which randomize selection based on evaluation scores. However, existing lottery designs are inherently unstable, as a small change to a single candidate's score can cause large shifts in their selection probabilities. This instability undermines a key goal of lotteries: reducing the influence of fine-grained score distinctions near the decision boundary. We propose smoothness as a design principle for partial lotteries, formalizing it as a Lipschitz ...
| Authors | Alexander Goldberg, Giulia Fanti, Nihar B. Shah |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 19 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 May 2026 |
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