Allocation Schemes in Analytic Evaluation: Applicant-Centric Holistic or Attribute-Centric Segmented?

Many applications such as hiring and university admissions involve evaluation and selection of applicants. These tasks are fundamentally difficult, and require combining evidence from multiple different aspects (what we term "attributes"). In these applications, the number of applicants is often large, and a common practice is to assign the task to multiple evaluators in a distributed fashion. Specifically, in the often-used holistic allocation, each evaluator is assigned a subset of the applicants, and is asked to assess all relevant information for their assigned applicants. However, such an evaluation process is subject to issues such as miscalibration (evaluators see only a small fraction of the applicants and may not get a good sense of relative quality), and discrimination (evaluators are influenced by irrelevant information about the applicants). We identify that such attribute-based evaluation allows alternative allocation schemes. Specifically, we consider assigning each evaluator more applicants but fewer attributes per applicant, termed segmented allocation. We compare segmented allocation to holistic allocation on several dimensions via theoretical and experimental methods. We establish various tradeoffs between these two approaches, and identify conditions under which one approach results in more accurate evaluation than the other

Tyrosinase as an autoantigen in patients with vitiligo

Vitiligo is considered an autoimmune disorder due to the generation and presence of autoantibodies directed against melanocyte antigens in the patients' sera. In the present study we point towards a newly defined autoantigen in vitiligo, the enzyme tyrosinase, which participates in the process of melanogenesis. Anti-tyrosinase antibodies were detected in the sera of seven patients with diffuse and 11 patients with localized vitiligo. Employing solid-phase ELISA to mushroom tyrosinase, we found that patients with diffuse vitiligo had significantly higher titres of IgG anti-tyrosinase autoantibodies than patients with localized disease or healthy subjects. These anti-tyrosinase autoantibodies have relatively high functional affinity to tyrosinase and can be recovered from vitiligo patients’ sera by affinity purification. The anti-tyrosinase antibodies do not cross-react with other enzymes recognized as autoantigens in different autoimmune disorders and the autoantibodies do not block the enzymatic activity of tyrosinase, indicating that they are not reacting with the catalytic site of the enzyme. These data point to tyrosinase as an autoantigen in vitiligo and suggest that anti-tyrosinase titres can serve as a marker for disease activity