Impartial peer review

Motivated by a radically new peer review system that the National Science Foundation recently ex-perimented with, we study peer review systems in which proposals are reviewed by PIs who have sub-mitted proposals themselves. An (m, k)-selection mechanism asks each PI to reviewm proposals, and uses these reviews to select (at most) k proposals. We are interested in impartial mechanisms, which guarantee that the ratings given by a PI to others’ proposals do not affect the likelihood of the PI’s own proposal being selected. We design an impar-tial mechanism that selects a k-subset of proposals that is nearly as highly rated as the one selected by the non-impartial (abstract version of) the NSF pi-lot mechanism, even when the latter mechanism has the “unfair ” advantage of eliciting honest reviews.