Optimal allocation of proposals to reviewers to facilitate effective ranking

Peer review of research proposals and articles is an essential element in research and development processes worldwide. Here we consider a problem that, to the best of our knowledge, has not been addressed until now: how to assign subsets of proposals to reviewers in scenarios where the reviewers supply their evaluations through ordinal ranking. The solution approach we propose for this assignment problem maximizes the number of proposal pairs that will be evaluated by one or more reviewers. This new approach should facilitate meaningful aggregation of partial rankings of subsets of proposals by multiple reviewers into a consensus ranking. We offer two ways to implement the approach: an integer-programming set-covering model and a heuristic procedure. The effectiveness and efficiency of the two models are tested through an extensive simulation experiment.