Incentive-Aware Machine Learning; Robustness, Fairness, Improvement & Causality
This work addresses the societal and technical challenges of incentive-aware ML for developers and policymakers, but it is incremental as it synthesizes existing findings into a framework.
The paper tackles the problem of algorithmic decision-making where individuals can strategically modify inputs, categorizing research into robustness, fairness, and improvement/causality perspectives, and introduces a unified framework to address challenges like differentiating gaming from improvement.
The article explores the emerging domain of incentive-aware machine learning (ML), which focuses on algorithmic decision-making in contexts where individuals can strategically modify their inputs to influence outcomes. It categorizes the research into three perspectives: robustness, aiming to design models resilient to "gaming"; fairness, analyzing the societal impacts of such systems; and improvement/causality, recognizing situations where strategic actions lead to genuine personal or societal improvement. The paper introduces a unified framework encapsulating models for these perspectives, including offline, online, and causal settings, and highlights key challenges such as differentiating between gaming and improvement and addressing heterogeneity among agents. By synthesizing findings from diverse works, we outline theoretical advancements and practical solutions for robust, fair, and causally-informed incentive-aware ML systems.