A just approach balancing rawlsian leximax fairness and utilitarianism

Violet Xinying Chen, J. N. Hooker

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

Numerous AI-assisted resource allocation decisions need to balance the conflicting goals of fairness and efficiency. Our paper studies the challenging task of defining and modeling a proper fairness-efficiency trade off. We define fairness with Rawlsian leximax fairness, which views the lexicographic maximum among all feasible outcomes as the most equitable; and define efficiency with Utilitarianism, which seeks to maximize the sum of utilities received by entities regardless of individual differences. Motivated by a justice-driven trade off principle: prioritize fairness to benefit the less advantaged unless too much efficiency is sacrificed, we propose a sequential optimization procedure to balance leximax fairness and utilitarianism in decision-making. Each iteration of our approach maximizes a social welfare function, and we provide a practical mixed integer/linear programming (MILP) formulation for each maximization problem. We illustrate our method on a budget allocation example. Compared with existing approaches of balancing equity and efficiency, our method is more interpretable in terms of parameter selection, and incorporates a strong equity criterion with a thoroughly balanced perspective.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAIES 2020 - Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society
Pages221-227
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781450371100
DOIs
StatePublished - 7 Feb 2020
Event3rd AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, AIES 2020, co-located with AAAI 2020 - New York, United States
Duration: 7 Feb 20208 Feb 2020

Publication series

NameAIES 2020 - Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society

Conference

Conference3rd AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, AIES 2020, co-located with AAAI 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew York
Period7/02/208/02/20

Keywords

  • Distributive Justice
  • Fairness
  • Trade off
  • Utilitarianism

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