# Fair and Useful Cohort Selection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.02207 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.02207/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [ACR: A Benchmark for Automatic Cohort Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14780/) (2024)
- [Fair and Optimal Cohort Selection for Linear Utilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07684/) (2021)
- [Smooth Partial Lotteries for Stable Randomized Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.20069/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A challenge in fair algorithm design is that, while there are compelling notions of individual fairness, these notions typically do not satisfy desirable composition properties, and downstream applications based on fair classifiers might not preserve fairness. To study fairness under composition, Dwork and Ilvento introduced an archetypal problem called fair-cohort-selection problem, where a single fair classifier is composed with itself to select a group of candidates of a given size, and proposed a solution to this problem. In this work we design algorithms for selecting cohorts that not only preserve fairness, but also maximize the utility of the selected cohort under two notions of utility that we introduce and motivate. We give optimal (or approximately optimal) polynomial-time algorithms for this problem in both an offline setting, and an online setting where candidates arrive one at a time and are classified as they arrive.