Balancing Optimality and Diversity: Human-Centered Decision Making through Generative Curation

Operational decisions in healthcare, logistics, and public policy increasingly involve algorithms that recommend candidate solutions, such as treatment plans, delivery routes, or policy options, while leaving the final choice to human decision-makers. For instance, school districts use algorithms to design bus routes, but administrators make the final call given community feedback. In these settings, decision quality depends not on a single algorithmic ``optimum'', but on whether the portfolio of recommendations contains at least one option the human ultimately deems desirable. We propose generative curation, a framework that optimally generates recommendation sets when desirability depends on both observable objectives and unobserved qualitative considerations. Instead of a fixed solution, generative curation learns a distribution over solutions designed to maximize the expected desirability of the best option within a manageable portfolio. Our analysis identifies a trade-off between quantitative quality and qualitative diversity, formalized through a novel diversity metric derived from the reformulated objective. We implement the framework using a generative neural network and a sequential optimization method, and show in synthetic and real-world studies that it consistently reduces expected regret compared to existing benchmarks. Our framework provides decision-makers with a principled way to design algorithms that complement, rather than replace, human judgment. By generating portfolios of diverse yet high-quality options, decision-support tools can better accommodate unmodeled factors such as stakeholder preferences, political feasibility, or community acceptance. More broadly, the framework enables organizations to operationalize human-centered decision-making at scale, ensuring that algorithmic recommendations remain useful even when objectives are incomplete or evolving.