Is That Decision Fair? A Formal Model to Assess an Individual's Belief on the Fairness of a Decision
Abstract:
The concept of fairness has been addressed by many disciplines on various dimensions, including determining how individuals react under various scenarios, the fair distribution of resources, and designing intelligent systems that make fair decisions. However, prior studies have not attempted to formally represent individuals’ view of a fair decision mathematically nor determined how to represent the degree to which a decision is viewed as fair by individuals. Based on the concept that “fairness is in the eye of the beholder,” we provide a framework to formally represent individuals’ view of the fairness of a decision using the scheme in Dempster and Schafer’s theory of evidence. This allows us to not only capture the strength of the individual’s fairness belief but also represent the person’s indifference to the outcome of the decision. We further illustrate how a decision maker can use the knowledge of the fairness beliefs of a group of individuals to make an optimal decision on the fairness criteria. We believe the proposed model can be used in various domains including the design and verification of intelligent system decisions and identifying reactions to policy decisions, as well as determining reactions to posts on controversial topics on social media. We also used data from Tweeter and Youtube to validate and operationalize our model.