Procedural Justice in Algorithmic Fairness

Abstract

As algorithms increasingly take managerial and governance roles, it is ever more important to build them to be perceived as fair and adopted by people. With this goal, we propose a procedural justice framework in algorithmic decision-making drawing from procedural justice theory, which lays out elements that promote a sense of fairness among users. As a case study, we built an interface that leveraged two key elements of the framework---transparency and outcome control---and evaluated it in the context of goods division. Our interface explained the algorithm's allocative fairness properties (standards clarity) and outcomes through an input-output matrix (outcome explanation), then allowed people to interactively adjust the algorithmic allocations as a group (outcome control). The findings from our within-subjects laboratory study suggest that standards clarity alone did not increase perceived fairness; outcome explanation had mixed effects, increasing or decreasing perceived fairness and reducing algorithmic accountability; and outcome control universally improved perceived fairness by allowing people to realize the inherent limitations of decisions and redistribute the goods to better fit their contexts, and by bringing human elements into final decision-making.

What do we want from Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)? – A stakeholder perspective on XAI and a conceptual model guiding interdisciplinary XAI research

“…Fairness Assess and increase a system's (actual) fairness Affected, Regulator [8, 12-14, 16, 22, 24, 32, 38, 40, 44, 51, 53, 55, 56, 58, 60, 63, 64, 67, 69, 70, 78, 81, 86, 87, 96-100] [ 29,43,68] Informed Consent Enable humans to give their informed consent concerning a system's decisions Affected, Regulator [15,56,57] Legal Compliance Assess and increase the legal compliance of a system Deployer [5, 7, 12, 15, 16, 21, 22, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 34, 35, 44, 47, 55, 56, 58, 62, 63, 66, 68-70, 74-76, 81, 87, 91, 98, 100-102] Morality/Ethics Assess and increase a system's compliance with moral and ethical standards Affected, Regulator [6,12,14,16,29,34,37,44,47,53,55,57,58,60,69,78] Performance Assess and increase the performance of a system Developer [15,26,32,…”

Ethics of Smart Cities: Towards Value-Sensitive Design and Co-Evolving City Life

“…Of course, one may still allow statistical evaluations of anonymised data for evidencebased governance [107-109]. However, procedural and algorithmic transparency will be needed [110].…”

Hivemind

“…This is oftentimes a complicated and obscure process, asking for iterative or continual refinements with a persuasive feedback beyond a single-pass process [77]. To be included is a mechanism to incorporate and enforce space-specific social rules ( §6).…”