The Bidirectionality-Preserving Feedback Arc Set Problem with an Application to Faculty Hiring Network Analysis

Abstract

This work introduces a novel combinatorial optimization problem to uncover strict and non-strict hierarchical structures underlying digraphs with bidirected arcs. We show that the problem includes the seminal feedback arc set problem as a special case, and that its solution extends a tournament solution known as Slater's rule. We introduce and compare two binary programming formulations and also introduce a polynomial-time search algorithm for obtaining an ordered hierarchy from their solution. The methodology is applied to the faculty hiring network problem using a dataset previously collected by Del Castillo et al. (2020) to characterize the prestige/rank of Industrial/Systems/Operations Research (IEOR) departments using faculty hiring transactions.