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  1. Algorithmic decision-making using rankings— prevalent in areas from hiring and bail to university admissions— raises concerns of potential bias. In this paper, we explore the alignment between people’s perceptions of fairness and two popular fairness metrics designed for rankings. In a crowdsourced experiment with 480 participants, people rated the perceived fairness of a hypothetical scholarship distribution scenario. Results suggest a strong inclination towards relying on explicit score values. There is also evidence of people’s preference for one fairness metric, NDKL, over the other metric, ARP. Qualitative results paint a more complex picture: some participants endorse meritocratic award schemes and express concerns about fairness metrics being used to modify rankings; while other participants acknowledge socio-economic factors in score-based rankings as justification for adjusting rankings. In summary, we find that operationalizing algorithmic fairness in practice is a balancing act between mitigating harms towards marginalized groups and societal conventions of leveraging traditional performance scores such as grades in decision-making contexts. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 3, 2025
  2. Preference aggregation mechanisms help decision-makers combine diverse preference rankings produced by multiple voters into a single consensus ranking. Prior work has developed methods for aggregating multiple rankings into a fair consensus over the same set of candidates. Yet few real-world problems present themselves as such precisely formulated aggregation tasks with each voter fully ranking all candidates. Instead, preferences are often expressed as rankings over partial and even disjoint subsets of candidates. For instance, hiring committee members typically opt to rank their top choices instead of exhaustively ordering every single job applicant. However, the existing literature does not offer a framework for characterizing nor ensuring group fairness in such partial preference aggregation tasks. Unlike fully ranked settings, partial preferences imply both a selection decision of whom to rank plus an ordering decision of how to rank the selected candidates. Our work fills this gap by conceptualizing the open problem of fair partial preference aggregation. We introduce an impossibility result for fair selection from partial preferences and design a computational framework showing how we can navigate this obstacle. Inspired by Single Transferable Voting, our proposed solution PreFair produces consensus rankings that are fair in the selection of candidates and also in their relative ordering. Our experimental study demonstrates that PreFair achieves the best performance in this dual fairness objective compared to state-of-the-art alternatives adapted to this new problem while still satisfying voter preferences. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 3, 2025
  3. In social choice, traditional Kemeny rank aggregation combines the preferences of voters, expressed as rankings, into a single consensus ranking without consideration for how this ranking may unfairly affect marginalized groups (i.e., racial or gender). Developing fair rank aggregation methods is critical due to their societal influence in applications prioritizing job applicants, funding proposals, and scheduling medical patients. In this work, we introduce the Fair Exposure Kemeny Aggregation Problem (FairExp-kap) for combining vast and diverse voter preferences into a single ranking that is not only a suitable consensus, but ensures opportunities are not withheld from marginalized groups. In formalizing FairExp-kap, we extend the fairness of exposure notion from information retrieval to the rank aggregation context and present a complimentary metric for voter preference representation. We design algorithms for solving FairExp-kap that explicitly account for position bias, a common ranking-based concern that end-users pay more attention to higher ranked candidates. epik solves FairExp-kap exactly by incorporating non-pairwise fairness of exposure into the pairwise Kemeny optimization; while the approximate epira is a candidate swapping algorithm, that guarantees ranked candidate fairness. Utilizing comprehensive synthetic simulations and six real-world datasets, we show the efficacy of our approach illustrating that we succeed in mitigating disparate group exposure unfairness in consensus rankings, while maximally representing voter preferences. 
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  4. For applications where multiple stakeholders provide recommendations, a fair consensus ranking must not only ensure that the preferences of rankers are well represented, but must also mitigate disadvantages among socio-demographic groups in the final result. However, there is little empirical guidance on the value or challenges of visualizing and integrating fairness metrics and algorithms into human-in-the-loop systems to aid decision-makers. In this work, we design a study to analyze the effectiveness of integrating such fairness metrics-based visualization and algorithms. We explore this through a task-based crowdsourced experiment comparing an interactive visualization system for constructing consensus rankings, ConsensusFuse, with a similar system that includes visual encodings of fairness metrics and fair-rank generation algorithms, FairFuse. We analyze the measure of fairness, agreement of rankers’ decisions, and user interactions in constructing the fair consensus ranking across these two systems. In our study with 200 participants, results suggest that providing these fairness-oriented support features nudges users to align their decision with the fairness metrics while minimizing the tedious process of manually having to amend the consensus ranking. We discuss the implications of these results for the design of next-generation fairness oriented-systems and along with emerging directions for future research. 
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  5. Fair consensus building combines the preferences of multiple rankers into a single consensus ranking, while ensuring any group defined by a protected attribute (such as race or gender) is not disadvantaged compared to other groups. Manually generating a fair consensus ranking is time-consuming and impractical- even for a fairly small number of candidates. While algorithmic approaches for auditing and generating fair consensus rankings have been developed, these have not been operationalized in interactive systems. To bridge this gap, we introduce FairFuse, a visualization system for generating, analyzing, and auditing fair consensus rankings. We construct a data model which includes base rankings entered by rankers, augmented with measures of group fairness, and algorithms for generating consensus rankings with varying degrees of fairness. We design novel visualizations that encode these measures in a parallel-coordinates style rank visualization, with interactions for generating and exploring fair consensus rankings. We describe use cases in which FairFuse supports a decision-maker in ranking scenarios in which fairness is important, and discuss emerging challenges for future efforts supporting fairness-oriented rank analysis. Code and demo videos available at https://osf.io/hd639/. 
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  6. Subset selection is an integral component of AI systems that is increasingly affecting people’s livelihoods in applications ranging from hiring, healthcare, education, to financial decisions. Subset selections powered by AI-based methods include top- analytics, data summarization, clustering, and multi-winner voting. While group fairness auditing tools have been proposed for classification systems, these state-of-the-art tools are not directly applicable to measuring and conceptualizing fairness in selected subsets. In this work, we introduce the first comprehensive auditing framework, FINS, to support stakeholders in interpretably quantifying group fairness across a diverse range of subset-specific fairness concerns. FINS offers a family of novel measures that provide a flexible means to audit group fairness for fairness goals ranging from item-based, score-based, and a combination thereof. FINS provides one unified easy-to-understand interpretation across these different fairness problems. Further, we develop guidelines through the FINS Fair Subset Chart, that supports auditors in determining which measures are relevant to their problem context and fairness objectives. We provide a comprehensive mapping between each fairness measure and the belief system (i.e., worldview) that is encoded within its measurement of fairness. Lastly, we demonstrate the interpretability and efficacy of FINS in supporting the identification of real bias with case studies using AirBnB listings and voter records. 
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  7. Combining the preferences of many rankers into one single consensus ranking is critical for consequential applications from hiring and admissions to lending. While group fairness has been extensively studied for classification, group fairness in rankings and in particular rank aggregation remains in its infancy. Recent work introduced the concept of fair rank aggregation for combining rankings but restricted to the case when candidates have a single binary protected attribute, i.e., they fall into two groups only. Yet it remains an open problem how to create a consensus ranking that represents the preferences of all rankers while ensuring fair treatment for candidates with multiple protected attributes such as gender, race, and nationality. In this work, we are the first to define and solve this open Multi-attribute Fair Consensus Ranking (MFCR) problem. As a foundation, we design novel group fairness criteria for rankings, called MANI-Rank, ensuring fair treatment of groups defined by individual protected attributes and their intersection. Leveraging the MANI-Rank criteria, we develop a series of algorithms that for the first time tackle the MFCR problem. Our experimental study with a rich variety of consensus scenarios demonstrates our MFCR methodology is the only approach to achieve both intersectional and protected attribute fairness while also representing the preferences expressed through many base rankings. Our real-world case study on merit scholarships illustrates the effectiveness of our MFCR methods to mitigate bias across multiple protected attributes and their intersections. 
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  8. null (Ed.)
    Ranking evaluation metrics play an important role in information retrieval, providing optimization objectives during development and means of assessment of deployed performance. Recently, fairness of rankings has been recognized as crucial, especially as automated systems are increasingly used for high impact decisions. While numerous fairness metrics have been proposed, a comparative analysis to understand their interrelationships is lacking. Even for fundamental statistical parity metrics which measure group advantage, it remains unclear whether metrics measure the same phenomena, or when one metric may produce different results than another. To address these open questions, we formulate a conceptual framework for analytical comparison of metrics.We prove that under reasonable assumptions, popular metrics in the literature exhibit the same behavior and that optimizing for one optimizes for all. However, our analysis also shows that the metrics vary in the degree of unfairness measured, in particular when one group has a strong majority. Based on this analysis, we design a practical statistical test to identify whether observed data is likely to exhibit predictable group bias. We provide a set of recommendations for practitioners to guide the choice of an appropriate fairness metric. 
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  9. null (Ed.)