Hi all,
Our final virtual meeting of this semester will be at 12pm (EST) Wednesday,
December 2, where we will hear Kosuke Imai (Harvard University) presents
research on "Experimental Evaluation of Algorithm-Assisted Human
Decision-Making: Application to Pretrial Public Safety Assessment."
*Abstract*:
Despite an increasing reliance on fully-automated algorithmic decision
making in our day-to-day lives, human beings still make highly
consequential decisions. As frequently seen in business, healthcare, and
public policy, recommendations produced by algorithms are provided to human
decision-makers in order to guide their decisions. While there exists a
fast growing literature evaluating the bias and fairness of such
algorithmic recommendations, an overlooked question is whether they help
humans make better decisions. We develop a statistical methodology for
experimentally evaluating the causal impacts of algorithmic recommendations
on human decisions. We also show how to examine whether algorithmic
recommendations improve the fairness of human decisions and derive the
optimal decisions under various settings. We apply the proposed
methodology to the first-ever randomized controlled trial that evaluates
the pretrial public safety assessment (PSA) in the criminal justice system.
A goal of the PSA is to help judges decide which arrested individuals
should be released. We find that the PSA provision has little overall
impact on the judge’s decisions and subsequent arrestee behavior. However,
our analysis suggests that the PSA may help avoid unnecessarily harsh
decisions for female arrestees regardless of their risk levels while it
encourages the judge to make stricter decisions for male arrestees who are
deemed to be risky. In terms of fairness, the PSA appears to increase the
gender bias against males while having little effect on the existing racial
biases of the judge’s decisions against non-white males. Finally, we show
that PSA’s recommendations are often too severe and can only be justified
if the societal cost of a new crime is much higher than the cost of an
unnecessarily harsh decision.
*Zoom link*:
https://harvard.zoom.us/j/99424949004?pwd=aWtPNFM3ZzFYbWxIMXNoZDlyUElVZz09
*Schedule of the workshop*:
https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/applied.stats.workshop-gov3009
Best,
Soichiro
--
Soichiro Yamauchi
PhD candidate
Harvard University
URL:
https://soichiroy.github.io/