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Abstract:
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"The substantive focus of this paper is an institutionalized process
in the U.S. House of Representatives known as the committee assignment process. There is, however, a wider class of problems of which
this is a special case, namely the classification and selection of
personnel. After reviewing the temporal sequence of events that
constitute the committee assignment process, the principal actors
and their goals are identified. This permits the process to be
characterized by self-interested actors engaging in goal-seeking
behavior. Institutional constraints, a consequence of formal
rules and scarcity, restrict the form that goal-seeking takes.
With the specification of goals and constraints the entire process
is formalized as a special kind of linear programming problem, called (naturally enough) the assignment problem. Given this formal structure a number of theoretical properties are established in an effort to understand the operating characteristics of this important institutional process."
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