A framework for fair decision-making over time with time-invariant utilities

Andrea Lodi, Sriram Sankaranarayanan and Guanyi Wang

European Journal of Operational Research, 2024, vol. 319, issue 2, 456-467

Abstract: Fairness is a major concern in contemporary decision problems. In these situations, the objective is to maximize fairness while preserving the efficacy of the underlying decision-making problem. This paper examines repeated decisions on problems involving multiple stakeholders and a central decision maker. Repetition of the decision-making provides additional opportunities to promote fairness while increasing the complexity from symmetry to finding solutions. This paper presents a general mathematical programming framework for the proposed fairness-over-time (FOT) decision-making problem. The framework includes a natural abstraction of how a stakeholder’s acquired utilities can be aggregated over time. In contrast with a natural, descriptive formulation, we demonstrate that if the aggregation function possesses certain basic properties, a strong reformulation can be written to remove symmetry from the problem, making it amenable to branch-and-cut solvers. Finally, we propose a particular relaxation of this reformulation that can assist in the construction of high-quality approximate solutions to the original problem and can be solved using simultaneous row and column generation techniques.

Keywords: Integer programming; Fair decision making; Column generation; Row generation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:319:y:2024:i:2:p:456-467

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2023.11.030

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