{"ID":2838402,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16897","arxiv_id":"2511.16897","title":"Near-Optimal Dropout-Robust Sortition","abstract":"Citizens' assemblies - small panels of citizens that convene to deliberate on policy issues - often face the issue of panelists dropping out at the last-minute. Without intervention, these dropouts compromise the size and representativeness of the panel, prompting the question: Without seeing the dropouts ahead of time, can we choose panelists such that after dropouts, the panel will be representative and appropriately-sized? We model this problem as a minimax game: the minimizer aims to choose a panel that minimizes the loss, i.e., the deviation of the ultimate panel from predefined representation targets. Then, an adversary defines a distribution over dropouts from which the realized dropouts are drawn. Our main contribution is an efficient loss-minimizing algorithm, which remains optimal as we vary the maximizer's power from worst case to average case. Our algorithm - which iteratively plays a projected gradient descent subroutine against an efficient algorithm for computing the best-response dropout distribution - also addresses a key open question in the area: how to manage dropouts while ensuring that each potential panelist is chosen with relatively equal probabilities. Using real-world datasets, we compare our algorithms to existing benchmarks, and we offer the first characterizations of tradeoffs between robustness, loss, and equality in this problem.","short_abstract":"Citizens' assemblies - small panels of citizens that convene to deliberate on policy issues - often face the issue of panelists dropping out at the last-minute. Without intervention, these dropouts compromise the size and representativeness of the panel, prompting the question: Without seeing the dropouts ahead of time...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.16897","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.16897v1","authors":"[\"Maya Pal Gambhir\",\"Bailey Flanigan\",\"Aaron Roth\"]","published":"2025-11-21T02:22:36Z","proceeding":"cs.GT","tasks":"[\"cs.GT\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}