Abstract

Deploying an algorithmically informed policy is a significant intervention in society. Prominent methods for algorithmic fairness focus on the distribution of predictions at the time of training, rather than the distribution of social goods that arises after deploying the algorithm in a specific social context. However, requiring a ‘fair’ distribution of predictions may undermine efforts at establishing a fair distribution of social goods. First, we argue that addressing this problem requires a notion of prospective fairness that anticipates the change in the distribution of social goods after deployment. Second, we provide formal conditions under which this change is identified from pre-deployment data. That requires accounting for different kinds of performative effects. Here, we focus on the way predictions change policy decisions and, consequently, the causally downstream distribution of social goods. Throughout, we are guided by an application from public administration: the use of algorithms to predict who among the recently unemployed will remain unemployed in the long term and to target them with labor market programs. Third, using administrative data from the Swiss public employment service, we simulate how such algorithmically informed policies would affect gender inequalities in long-term unemployment. When risk predictions are required to be ‘fair’ according to statistical parity and equality of opportunity, targeting decisions are less effective, undermining efforts to both lower overall levels of long-term unemployment and to close the gender gap in long-term unemployment.