Committee Selection with Attribute Level Preferences

Approval ballot based committee formation is concerned with aggregating individual approvals of voters. Voters submit their approvals of candidates and these approvals are aggregated to arrive at the optimal committee of specified size. There are several aggregation techniques proposed in the literature and these techniques differ among themselves on the criterion function they optimize. Voters preferences for a candidate is based on his/her opinion on candidate suitability. We note that candidates have attributes that make him/her suitable or otherwise. Hence, it is relevant to approve attributes and select candidates who have the approved attributes. This paper addresses the committee selection problem when voters submit their approvals on attributes. Though attribute based preference is addressed in several contexts, committee selection problem with attribute approval has not been attempted earlier. We note that extending the theory of candidate approval to attribute approval in committee selection problem is not trivial. In this paper, we study different aspects of this problem and show that none of the existing aggregation rules satisfies Unanimity and Justified Representation when attribute based approvals are considered. We propose a new aggregation rule that satisfies both the above properties. We also present other analysis of committee selection problem with attribute approval.