Fair(er) and (Almost) Serene Committee Meetings with Logical and Formal Concept Analysis

In academia, many decisions are taken in committee, for example to hire people or to allocate resources. Genuine people often leave such meetings quite frustrated. Indeed, it is intrinsically hard to make multi-criteria decisions, selection criteria are hard to express and the global picture is too large for participants to embrace it fully. In this article, we describe a recruiting process where logical concept analysis and formal concept analysis are used to address the above problems. We do not pretend to totally eliminate the arbitrary side of the decision. We claim, however, that, thanks to concept analysis, genuine people have the possibility to 1) be fair with the candidates, 2) make a decision adapted to the circumstances, 3) smoothly express the rationales of decisions, 4) be consistent in their judgements during the whole meeting, 5) vote (or be arbitrary) only when all possibilities for consensus have been exhausted, and 6) make sure that the result, in general a total order, is consistent with the partial orders resulting from the multiple criteria.