Amy Voida

Amanda Aird, Paresha Farastu, Joshua Sun et al.

Algorithmic fairness in the context of personalized recommendation presents significantly different challenges to those commonly encountered in classification tasks. Researchers studying classification have generally considered fairness to be a matter of achieving equality of outcomes between a protected and unprotected group, and built algorithmic interventions on this basis. We argue that fairness in real-world application settings in general, and especially in the context of personalized recommendation, is much more complex and multi-faceted, requiring a more general approach. We propose a model to formalize multistakeholder fairness in recommender systems as a two stage social choice problem. In particular, we express recommendation fairness as a novel combination of an allocation and an aggregation problem, which integrate both fairness concerns and personalized recommendation provisions, and derive new recommendation techniques based on this formulation. Simulations demonstrate the ability of the framework to integrate multiple fairness concerns in a dynamic way.

Fujiko Robledo Yamamoto, Nicholas Mattei, Pradeep Ragothaman et al.

Fairness in machine learning is often conceptualized narrowly in comparative, distributional terms. In studying stakeholders' concepts of fairness, we find that this framing is insufficient to capture the full range of issues raised. As an alternative, we propose organizational justice as a framework that subsumes distributional fairness as well as other normative concerns. We conduct a case study of organizational justice relative to personalized recommendation in the context of Kiva Microfunds, a nonprofit micro-lending organization whose mission is to increase financial access for underserved communities across the world. We report on the results of co-design workshops conducted with Kiva employees who are involved in different departments and whose roles often lead them to prioritize normative concerns that are most supportive of the stakeholders with whom they work most closely. We apply organizational justice to understand design trade-offs among different normative goals stakeholders invoke. Based on these goals, we identify a suite of metrics that Kiva employees can use to monitor and assess the recommender system's impact on their organizational justice concerns and to seed discussions within the organization about appropriate configuration and deployment of this system in context.