How Do Fairness Definitions Fare?

Abstract

What is the best way to define algorithmic fairness? While many definitions of fairness have been proposed in the computer science literature, there is no clear agreement over a particular definition. In this work, we investigate ordinary people's perceptions of three of these fairness definitions. Across two online experiments, we test which definitions people perceive to be the fairest in the context of loan decisions, and whether fairness perceptions change with the addition of sensitive information (i.e., race of the loan applicants). Overall, one definition (calibrated fairness) tends to be more pre- ferred than the others, and the results also provide support for the principle of affirmative action.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 157 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.