Beyond Distributive Justice: Hermeneutical Fairness in Ad Delivery

2026-05-05

AI Summary

This study addresses a critical gap in online advertising fairness research, which has predominantly focused on distributive justice while overlooking hermeneutical injustice arising from how ad content is interpreted by audiences. Introducing hermeneutical justice theory into this domain for the first time, the work proposes group-level hermeneutical fairness constraints and integrates them with distributive fairness within a utility-driven ad delivery framework. Leveraging relevance patterns derived from an AIDS-related ad evaluation survey and validated through controlled simulations, the findings demonstrate that purely utility-optimized delivery often underexposes vulnerable groups; under high hermeneutical risk, incorporating distributive fairness constraints substantially reduces hermeneutical costs with minimal utility loss; conversely, optimizing solely for hermeneutical cost leads to overly concentrated ad delivery. This research broadens the analytical scope of algorithmic fairness and offers a novel pathway for designing ad systems that balance multiple fairness objectives.

Abstract

Fairness in online advertising is often formalized as a distributive justice problem, aiming to ensure that impressions, opportunities, or outcomes are allocated comparably across protected groups. Yet online advertising can still produce harms arising from ads' content and from how recipients interpret and uptake them. To capture this dimension, we draw on Miranda Fricker's notion of hermeneutical injustice. We model ad delivery as a mechanism that distributes interpretative resources and can fail in two ways: relevant concepts can be withheld through systematic under-exposure, leading to hermeneutical deprivation; and recipients may experience hermeneutical distortions when saturated with low-uptake or skewed framings. Grounded in exploratory correlational patterns from the AIDS Advertising Evaluation surveys (1986-1987), we introduce a group-level hermeneutical fairness constraint and a hermeneutically aware utility cost. We integrate them into a benchmark, utility-driven ad allocation framework that already enforces distributive justice, yielding a distributively fair, hermeneutically aware framework that prevents deprivation and distortion from concentrating within protected groups. Through controlled simulations, we explore trade-offs between economic utility, classical distributive fairness constraints, and hermeneutical cost. The results show that purely utility-based allocation drives under-delivery to the disadvantaged group. When the hermeneutical stakes of withholding ads are high, distributive constraints reduce hermeneutical cost at modest utility loss. Conversely, weighting hermeneutical cost without distributive constraints can yield policies concentrated on the disadvantaged group. These findings motivate expanding fairness analyses of online advertising beyond distributive notions to include epistemic conditions of interpretation and uptake.

Problem

• hermeneutical injustice
• ad delivery
• distributive justice
• interpretative resources
• fairness in advertising

Innovation

• hermeneutical fairness
• ad delivery
• distributive justice
• interpretative resources
• algorithmic fairness