Decision-makers in high-stakes selection processes often face a fundamental choice: whether to make decisions themselves or to delegate authority to another entity whose incentives may only be partially aligned with their own. Such delegation arises naturally in settings like graduate admissions, hiring, or promotion, where a principal (e.g. a professor or worker) either reviews applicants personally or decisions are delegated to an agent (e.g. a committee or boss) that evaluates applicants efficiently, but according to a potentially misaligned objective. We study this trade-off in a stylized selection model with noisy signals. The principal incurs a cost for selecting applicants, but can evaluate applicants based on their fit with a project, team, workplace, etc. In contrast, the agent evaluates applicants solely on the basis of a signal that correlates with the principal's metric, but this comes at no cost to the principal. Our goal is to characterize when delegation is beneficial versus when decision-making should remain with the principal. We compare these regimes along three dimensions: (i) the principal's utility, (ii) the quality of the selected applicants according to the principal's metric, and (iii) the fairness of selection outcomes under disparate signal qualities.

翻译：高风险选拔过程中的决策者常常面临一个根本性选择：是自行决策，还是将权力委托给另一个其激励可能仅与自身部分一致的实体。这种授权在诸如研究生招生、招聘或晋升等场景中自然出现，其中委托人（例如教授或员工）要么亲自审核申请人，要么将决策权委托给代理人（例如委员会或上级），后者能高效评估申请人，但依据的可能是存在偏差的目标。我们在一个包含噪声信号的程式化选拔模型中研究这种权衡。委托人筛选申请人需付出成本，但能根据申请人与项目、团队、工作环境等的匹配度进行评估。相比之下，代理人仅依据与委托人评估指标相关的信号来评估申请人，且委托人无需为此承担成本。我们的目标是刻画授权在何种情况下有益，以及决策权应在何时保留给委托人。我们从三个维度比较这些机制：（i）委托人的效用，（ii）根据委托人指标衡量的入选申请人质量，以及（iii）在信号质量存在差异情况下的选拔结果公平性。