Online Decision Making with Fairness over Time

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Chen, Rui, Gunluk, Oktay, Lodi, Andrea, Wang, Guanyi
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2022
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author Chen, Rui
Gunluk, Oktay
Lodi, Andrea
Wang, Guanyi
author_facet Chen, Rui
Gunluk, Oktay
Lodi, Andrea
Wang, Guanyi
contents Online platforms increasingly rely on sequential decision-making algorithms to allocate resources, match users, or control exposure, while facing growing pressure to ensure fairness over time. We study a general online decision-making framework in which a platform repeatedly makes decisions from possibly non-convex and discrete feasible sets, such as indivisible assignments or assortment choices, to maximize accumulated reward. Importantly, these decisions must jointly satisfy a set of general, $m$-dimensional, potentially unbounded but convex global constraints, which model diverse long-term fairness goals beyond simple budget caps. We develop a primal-dual algorithm that interprets fairness constraints as dynamic prices and updates them online based on observed outcomes. The algorithm is simple to implement, requiring only the solution of perturbed local optimization problems at each decision step. Under the standard random permutation model, we show that our method achieves $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{mT})$ regret in expected reward while guaranteeing $O(\sqrt{mT})$ violation of long-term fairness constraints deterministically over a horizon of $T$ steps. To capture realistic demand patterns such as periodicity or perturbation, we further extend our guarantees to a grouped random permutation model.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2211_03997
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Online Decision Making with Fairness over Time
Chen, Rui
Gunluk, Oktay
Lodi, Andrea
Wang, Guanyi
Optimization and Control
Data Structures and Algorithms
Online platforms increasingly rely on sequential decision-making algorithms to allocate resources, match users, or control exposure, while facing growing pressure to ensure fairness over time. We study a general online decision-making framework in which a platform repeatedly makes decisions from possibly non-convex and discrete feasible sets, such as indivisible assignments or assortment choices, to maximize accumulated reward. Importantly, these decisions must jointly satisfy a set of general, $m$-dimensional, potentially unbounded but convex global constraints, which model diverse long-term fairness goals beyond simple budget caps. We develop a primal-dual algorithm that interprets fairness constraints as dynamic prices and updates them online based on observed outcomes. The algorithm is simple to implement, requiring only the solution of perturbed local optimization problems at each decision step. Under the standard random permutation model, we show that our method achieves $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{mT})$ regret in expected reward while guaranteeing $O(\sqrt{mT})$ violation of long-term fairness constraints deterministically over a horizon of $T$ steps. To capture realistic demand patterns such as periodicity or perturbation, we further extend our guarantees to a grouped random permutation model.
title Online Decision Making with Fairness over Time
topic Optimization and Control
Data Structures and Algorithms
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.03997