Committee selection under weight constraints

In this paper we investigate the problem of selecting a committee consisting of k members from a list of m candidates. Each candidate has a certain cost or weight. The choice of the k-committee has to satisfy some budget or weight constraint: the sum of the weights of all committee members must not exceed a given value W. While the former part of the problem is a typical question in Social Choice Theory, the latter stems from Operations Research. The purpose of this paper is to link these two research fields: we first characterize reasonable ways of ranking sets of objects, i.e., candidates, and then develop efficient algorithms for the actual computation of optimal committees.