Fairness without Regret

Abstract

A popular approach of achieving fairness in optimization problems is by constraining the solution space to "fair" solutions, which unfortunately typically reduces solution quality. In practice, the ultimate goal is often an aggregate of sub-goals without a unique or best way of combining them or which is otherwise only partially known. I turn this problem into a feature and suggest to use a parametrized objective and vary the parameters within reasonable ranges to get a "set" of optimal solutions, which can then be optimized using secondary criteria such as fairness without compromising the primary objective, i.e. without regret (societal cost).