Price of Fairness in Short-Term and Long-Term Algorithmic Selections

2026-05-07

AI Summary

This work addresses the tension between short-term utility and long-term fairness in sequential decision-making by proposing a novel fairness notion that jointly accounts for immediate group fairness and long-term population dynamics. The authors introduce the Price of Fairness (PoF) to quantify the trade-off between these objectives. Through theoretical modeling and dynamical systems analysis, they systematically uncover the mechanisms underlying the interplay—both synergistic and conflicting—between short- and long-term fairness. They prove that simple investment strategies can eliminate persistent group disparities with low PoF, thereby overcoming the limitations of static fairness constraints. Their theoretical findings reveal that PoF can remain substantial even when groups initially exhibit nearly identical distributions. Empirical evaluations on both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that the proposed strategies effectively reduce PoF and mitigate long-term inequality.

Abstract

Algorithmic decision-making in high-stakes settings can have profound impacts on individuals and populations. While much prior work studies fairness in static settings, recent results show that enforcing static fairness constraints may exacerbate long-run disparities. Motivated by this tension, we study a stylized sequential selection problem in which a decision-maker repeatedly selects individuals, affecting both immediate utility and the population distribution over time. We introduce notions of group fairness for both the short and long term and theoretically analyze the trade-off between fairness and utility via the Price of Fairness (PoF). We characterize optimal and fair policies in the short term and show that the PoF can be large even when group distributions are nearly identical. In contrast, we show that long-term disparities can vanish under simple investment policies that achieve a low PoF. We also empirically validate these theoretical observations using both synthetic and real datasets.

Problem

• Price of Fairness
• Algorithmic Selection
• Long-term Fairness
• Short-term Fairness
• Sequential Decision-making

Innovation

• Price of Fairness
• sequential selection
• long-term fairness
• algorithmic decision-making
• group fairness