Street-level bureaucrats interact directly with people on behalf of government agencies to perform a wide range of functions, including, for example, administering social services and policing. A key feature of street-level bureaucracy is that the civil servants, while tasked with implementing agency policy, are also granted significant discretion in how they choose to apply that policy in individual cases. Using that discretion could be beneficial, as it allows for exceptions to policies based on human interactions and evaluations, but it could also allow biases and inequities to seep into important domains of societal resource allocation. In this paper, we use machine learning techniques to understand street-level bureaucrats' behavior. We leverage a rich dataset that combines demographic and other information on households with information on which homelessness interventions they were assigned during a period when assignments were not formulaic. We find that  caseworker decisions in this time are highly predictable overall, and some, but not all of this predictivity can be captured by simple decision rules. We theorize that the decisions not captured by the simple decision rules can be considered applications of caseworker discretion. These discretionary decisions are far from random in both the characteristics of such households and in terms of the outcomes of the decisions. Caseworkers typically only apply discretion to households that would be considered less vulnerable. When they do apply discretion to assign households to more intensive interventions, the marginal benefits to those households are significantly higher than would be expected if the households were chosen at random; there is no similar reduction in marginal benefit to households that are discretionarily allocated less intensive interventions, suggesting that caseworkers are using their knowledge and experience to improve outcomes for households experiencing homelessness.

Discretionary Trees: Understanding Street-Level Bureaucracy via Machine Learning

Group-fair learning methods typically seek to ensure that some measure of prediction efficacy for (often historically) disadvantaged minority groups is comparable to that for the majority of the population. When a principal seeks to adopt a group-fair approach to replace another, the principal may face opposition from those who feel they may be harmed by the switch, and this, in turn, may deter adoption. We propose that a potential mitigation to this concern is to ensure that a group-fair model is also popular, in the sense that,  for a majority of the target population, it yields a preferred distribution over outcomes compared with the conventional model. In this paper, we show that state of the art fair learning approaches are often  unpopular in this sense. We propose several efficient algorithms for postprocessing an existing group-fair learning scheme to improve its popularity while retaining fairness. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed postprocessing approaches are highly effective in practice.

Popularizing Fairness: Group Fairness and Individual Welfare

AI is increasingly used to aid decision-making about the allocation of scarce societal resources, for example housing for homeless people, organs for transplantation, and food donations. Recently, there have been several proposals for how to design objectives for these systems that attempt to achieve some combination of fairness, efficiency, incentive compatibility, and satisfactory aggregation of stakeholder preferences. This paper lays out possible roles and opportunities for AI in this domain, arguing for a closer engagement with the political philosophy literature on local justice, which provides a framework for thinking about how societies have over time framed objectives for such allocation problems. It also discusses how we may be able to integrate into this framework the opportunities and risks opened up by the ubiquity of data and the availability of algorithms that can use them to make accurate predictions about the future.

Local Justice and the Algorithmic Allocation of Scarce Societal Resources

We study settings where a set of identical, reusable resources must be allocated in an online fashion to arriving agents. Each arriving agent is patient and willing to wait for some period of time to be matched. When matched, each agent occupies a resource for a certain amount of time, and then releases it, gaining some utility from having done so. The goal of the system designer is to maximize overall utility given some prior knowledge of the distribution of arriving agents. We are particularly interested in settings where demand for the resources far outstrips supply, as is typical in the provision of social services, for example homelessness resources. We formulate this problem as online bipartite matching with reusable resources and patient agents. We develop new, efficient nonmyopic algorithms for this class of problems, and compare their performance with that of greedy algorithms in a variety of simulated settings, as well as in a setting calibrated to real-world data on household demand for homelessness services. We find substantial overall welfare benefits to using our nonmyopic algorithms, particularly in more extreme settings -- those where agents are unwilling or unable to wait for resources, and where the ratio of resource demand to supply is particularly high.

Efficient Nonmyopic Online Allocation of Scarce Reusable Resources

In many societal resource allocation domains, machine learning methods are increasingly used to either score or rank agents in order to decide which ones should receive either resources (e.g., homeless services) or scrutiny (e.g., child welfare investigations) from social services agencies. An agency's scoring function typically operates on a feature vector that contains a combination of self-reported features and information available to the agency about individuals or households.
    This can create incentives for agents to misrepresent their self-reported features in order to receive resources or avoid scrutiny, but agencies may be able to selectively audit agents to verify the veracity of their reports.
    
    We study the problem of optimal auditing of agents in such settings. When decisions are made using a threshold on an agent's score, the optimal audit policy has a surprisingly simple structure, uniformly auditing all agents who could benefit from lying.
    While this policy can, in general be hard to compute because of the difficulty of identifying the set of agents who could benefit from lying given a complete set of reported types, we also present sufficient conditions under which it is tractable.
    We show that the scarce resource setting is more difficult, and exhibit an approximately optimal audit policy in this case.
    In addition, we show that in either setting verifying whether it is possible to incentivize exact truthfulness is hard even to approximate.
    However, we also exhibit sufficient conditions for solving this problem optimally, and for obtaining good approximations.

Incentivizing Truthfulness through Audits in Strategic Classification

We consider the allocation of scarce societal resources, where a central authority decides which individuals receive which resources under capacity or budget constraints. Several algorithmic fairness criteria have been proposed to guide these
procedures, each quantifying a notion of local justice to ensure the allocation is aligned with the principles of the local institution making the allocation. For example, the efficient allocation maximizes overall social welfare, whereas the leximin assignment seeks to help the â€œneediest first.â€ Although the â€œprice of fairnessâ€ (PoF) of leximin has been studied in prior work, we expand on these results by exploiting the structure inherent in real-world scenarios to provide tighter bounds. We further propose a novel criterion â€“ which we term LoINC (leximin over individually normalized costs) â€“ that maximizes a different but commonly used notion of local justice: prioritizing those benefiting the most from receiving the resources. We derive analogous PoF bounds for LoINC, showing that the price of LoINC is typically much lower than that of leximin. We provide extensive experimental results using both synthetic data and in a real-world setting considering the efficacy of different homelessness interventions. These results show that the empirical PoF tends to be substantially lower than worst-case bounds would imply and allow us to characterize situations where the price of LoINC fairness can be high.

Scarce Societal Resource Allocation and the Price of (Local) Justice

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Presentations

Discretionary Trees: Understanding Street-Level Bureaucracy via Machine Learning

Popularizing Fairness: Group Fairness and Individual Welfare

Local Justice and the Algorithmic Allocation of Scarce Societal Resources

Efficient Nonmyopic Online Allocation of Scarce Reusable Resources

Incentivizing Truthfulness through Audits in Strategic Classification

Scarce Societal Resource Allocation and the Price of (Local) Justice

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