Precarity: Modeling the Long Term Effects of Compounded Decisions on Individual Instability
It addresses the lack of focus on precarity in decision-making research, shifting perspective from decision-makers to subjects, which is important for understanding long-term impacts on individuals, though it appears incremental by applying simulation to an existing concept.
The paper tackles the problem of modeling how compounded decisions affect individual instability (precarity) over time, showing through simulations that negative decisions have heterogeneous ruinous effects across income classes and that policy interventions can mitigate these effects.
When it comes to studying the impacts of decision making, the research has been largely focused on examining the fairness of the decisions, the long-term effects of the decision pipelines, and utility-based perspectives considering both the decision-maker and the individuals. However, there has hardly been any focus on precarity which is the term that encapsulates the instability in people's lives. That is, a negative outcome can overspread to other decisions and measures of well-being. Studying precarity necessitates a shift in focus - from the point of view of the decision-maker to the perspective of the decision subject. This centering of the subject is an important direction that unlocks the importance of parting with aggregate measures to examine the long-term effects of decision making. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a modeling framework that simulates the effects of compounded decision-making on precarity over time. Through our simulations, we are able to show the heterogeneity of precarity by the non-uniform ruinous aftereffects of negative decisions on different income classes of the underlying population and how policy interventions can help mitigate such effects.