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Peer review assignment algorithms aim to match research papers to suitable expert reviewers, working to maximize the quality of the resulting reviews. A key challenge in designing effective assignment policies is evaluating how changes to the assignment algorithm map to changes in review quality. In this work, we leverage recently proposed policies that introduce randomness in peer-review assignment— in order to mitigate fraud—as a valuable opportunity to evaluate counterfactual assignment policies. Specifically, we exploit how such randomized assignments provide a positive probability of observing the reviews of many assignment policies of interest. To address challenges in applying standard off-policy evaluation methods, such as violations of positivity, we introduce novel methods for partial identification based on monotonicity and Lipschitz smoothness assumptions for the mapping between reviewer-paper covariates and outcomes. We apply our methods to peer-review data from two computer science venues: the TPDP'21 workshop (95 papers and 35 reviewers) and the AAAI'22 conference (8,450 papers and 3,145 reviewers). We consider estimates of (i) the effect on review quality when changing weights in the assignment algorithm, e.g., weighting reviewers' bids vs. textual similarity (between the review's past papers and the submission), and (ii) the "cost of randomization", capturing the difference in expected quality between the perturbed and unperturbed optimal match. We find that placing higher weight on text similarity results in higher review quality and that introducing randomization in the reviewer-paper assignment only marginally reduces the review quality. Our methods for partial identification may be of independent interest, while our off-policy approach can likely find use in evaluating a broad class of algorithmic matching systems. 

There are a number of forums where people participate under pseudonyms. One example is peer review, where the identity of reviewers for any paper is confidential. When participating in these forums, people frequently engage in "batching": executing multiple related tasks (e.g., commenting on multiple papers) at nearly the same time. Our empirical analysis shows that batching is common in two applications we consider -- peer review and Wikipedia edits. In this paper, we identify and address the risk of deanonymization arising from linking batched tasks. To protect against linkage attacks, we take the approach of adding delay to the posting time of batched tasks. We first show that under some natural assumptions, no delay mechanism can provide a meaningful differential privacy guarantee. We therefore propose a "one-sided" formulation of differential privacy for protecting against linkage attacks. We design a mechanism that adds zero-inflated uniform delay to events and show it can preserve privacy. We prove that this noise distribution is in fact optimal in minimizing expected delay among mechanisms adding independent noise to each event, thereby establishing the Pareto frontier of the trade-off between the expected delay for batched and unbatched events. Finally, we conduct a series of experiments on Wikipedia and Bitcoin data that corroborate the practical utility of our algorithm in obfuscating batching without introducing onerous delay to a system. 

Improving the peer review process in a scientific manner shows promise.