Fair Policy Targeting

One of the major concerns of targeting interventions on individuals in social welfare programs is discrimination: individualized treatments may induce disparities on sensitive attributes such as age, gender, or race. This paper addresses the question of the design of fair and efficient treatment allocation rules. We adopt the non-maleficence perspective of "first do no harm": we propose to select the fairest allocation within the Pareto frontier. We provide envy-freeness justifications to novel counterfactual notions of fairness. We discuss easy-to-implement estimators of the policy function, by casting the optimization into a mixed-integer linear program formulation. We derive regret bounds on the unfairness of the estimated policy function, and small sample guarantees on the Pareto frontier. Finally, we illustrate our method using an application from education economics.