Effort-aware Fairness: Incorporating a Philosophy-informed, Human-centered Notion of Effort into Algorithmic Fairness Metrics

Although popularized AI fairness metrics, e.g., demographic parity, have uncovered bias in AI-assisted decision-making outcomes, they do not consider how much effort one has spent to get to where one is today in the input feature space. However, the notion of effort is important in how Philosophy and humans understand fairness. We propose a philosophy-informed way to conceptualize and evaluate Effort-aware Fairness (EaF) based on the concept of Force, or temporal trajectory of predictive features coupled with inertia. In addition to our theoretical formulation of EaF metrics, our empirical contributions include: 1/ a pre-registered human subjects experiment, which demonstrates that for both stages of the (individual) fairness evaluation process, people consider the temporal trajectory of a predictive feature more than its aggregate value; 2/ pipelines to compute Effort-aware Individual/Group Fairness in the criminal justice and personal finance contexts. Our work may enable AI model auditors to uncover and potentially correct unfair decisions against individuals who spent significant efforts to improve but are still stuck with systemic/early-life disadvantages outside their control.

@article{nguyen2025_2505.19317,
  title={ Effort-aware Fairness: Incorporating a Philosophy-informed, Human-centered Notion of Effort into Algorithmic Fairness Metrics },
  author={ Tin Nguyen and Jiannan Xu and Zora Che and Phuong-Anh Nguyen-Le and Rushil Dandamudi and Donald Braman and Furong Huang and Hal Daumé III and Zubin Jelveh },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.19317},
  year={ 2025 }
}