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Fair Policy Targeting

Davide Viviano, Jelena Bradic

arXiv 25 May 2020 · Econometrics · publishedJournal of the American Statistical Association (2022)

arXiv:2005.12395 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

One of the major concerns of targeting interventions on individuals in social welfare programs is discrimination: individualized treatments may induce disparities across sensitive attributes such as age, gender, or race. This paper addresses the question of the design of fair and efficient treatment allocation rules. We adopt the non-maleficence perspective of first do no harm: we select the fairest allocation within the Pareto frontier. We cast the optimization into a mixed-integer linear program formulation, which can be solved using off-the-shelf algorithms. We derive regret bounds on the unfairness of the estimated policy function and small sample guarantees on the Pareto frontier under general notions of fairness. Finally, we illustrate our method using an application from education economics.

Citation extraction

64
references
148
in-text mentions
64
distinct cited
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self-citations
12,459
main-text words

appendix boundary found by appendix_command · 45% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Kilbertus, N., M. R. Carulla, G. Parascandolo, M. Hardt, D. Janzing,… (2017) Avoiding discrimination through causal reasoning1.00053100%
2Rambachan, A., J. Kleinberg, J. Ludwig, and S. Mullainathan (2020) An economic approach to regulating algorithms1.00053100%
3Kitagawa, T. and A. Tetenov (2018) Who should be treated? Empirical welfare maximization methods for treatment choice0.9619589%
4Athey, S. and S. Wager (2021) Policy learning with observational data0.9568588%
5Manski (2004) Statistical treatment rules for heterogeneous populations0.92843100%
6Nabi, R., D. Malinsky, and I. Shpitser (2019) Learning optimal fair policies0.92843100%
7Zhou, Z., S. Athey, and S. Wager (2018) Offline multi-action policy learning: Generalization and optimization0.87412567%
8Kasy, M. and R. Abebe (2020) Fairness, equality, and power in algorithmic decision making0.7373367%
9Elliott, G. and R. P. Lieli (2013) Predicting binary outcomes0.73732100%
10Narita, Y (2021) Incorporating ethics and welfare into randomized experiments0.73732100%

Showing the top 10 of 64 scored citations.

Cited by, within the corpus

arXiv econ.EM papers that cite this one, ranked by how heavily they lean on it.

Citing paperIntensityMentionsSections
1Regularizing Fairness in Optimal Policy Learning with Distributional Targets0.87492
2Empirical Welfare Maximization with Constraints0.40511
3Robust inference for the treatment effect variance in experiments using machine learning0.40511
4Econometrics of Machine Learning Methods in Economic Forecasting0.40511
5Inference for an Algorithmic Fairness-Accuracy Frontier0.40511
6Regret Analysis in Threshold Policy Design0.40511
7Testing the Fairness-Accuracy Improvability of Algorithms0.40511
8Policy Learning with $$-Expected Welfare0.40511
9Leave No One Undermined: Policy Targeting with Regret Aversion0.40511
10Policy Learning under Unobserved Confounding: A Robust and Efficient Approach0.40511