Merit-Based Sortition in Decentralized Systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes a merit-based sortition algorithm for decentralized systems that improves active set performance while maintaining fairness and upward mobility, addressing the need for performance optimization in coordination tasks.

Contribution

The paper introduces a simple merit-based sortition algorithm that enhances active set quality without sacrificing representativeness in decentralized systems.

Findings

Boosts active set performance metric by over 2 times the stochastic baseline.

Retains upward mobility for inactive participants, ensuring fairness.

Demonstrates effectiveness through numerical experiments.

Abstract

In decentralized systems, it is often necessary to select an 'active' subset of participants from the total participant pool, with the goal of satisfying computational limitations or optimizing resource efficiency. This selection can sometimes be made at random, mirroring the sortition practice invented in classical antiquity aimed at achieving a high degree of statistical representativeness. However, the recent emergence of specialized decentralized networks that solve concrete coordination problems and are characterized by measurable success metrics often requires prioritizing performance optimization over representativeness. We introduce a simple algorithm for 'merit-based sortition', in which the quality of each participant influences its probability of being drafted into the active set, while simultaneously retaining representativeness by allowing inactive participants an infinite number of chances to be drafted into the active set with non-zero probability. Using a suite of numerical experiments, we demonstrate that our algorithm boosts the quality metric describing the performance of the active set by $>2$ times the intrinsic stochasticity. This implies that merit-based sortition ensures a statistically significant performance boost to the drafted, 'active' set, while retaining the property of classical, random sortition that it enables upward mobility from a much larger 'inactive' set. This way, merit-based sortition fulfils a key requirement for decentralized systems in need of performance optimization.