Fair Policy Targeting

Understand

One of the major concerns of targeting interventions on individuals in social welfare programs is discrimination: individualized treatments may induce disparities across sensitive attributes such as age, gender, or race.

• This paper addresses the question of the design of fair and efficient treatment allocation rules.
• We adopt the non-maleficence perspective of first do no harm: we select the fairest allocation within the Pareto frontier.
• We cast the optimization into a mixed-integer linear program formulation, which can be solved using off-the-shelf algorithms.