Decoupling Procedural and Outcome Fairness in Seed Allocation for Influence Maximization

Abstract

On online social platforms, equal seed access to interventions can yield unequal group outcomes through social spillovers, so an access audit alone can miss outcome disparities. We characterise this trade-off through an exact allocation-structure decomposition and a sharp first-moment floor for graph-independent seeding under additive spillovers on stochastic block networks. Decoupled Procedural Allocation (DPA) combines group quotas with selection by seeds' contributions to each group's outcome. Rankings balance total outcome against disparity, and within-quota exchanges reduce the gap. Computable bounds quantify retained total outcome. DPA achieves the smallest mean outcome gap among the compared methods at the common access tolerances on both development and prospective suites. Exposure and independent-cascade studies show how the propagation mechanism changes this trade-off. On Pokec, DPA nearly equalises modelled gender outcomes at the closest access-parity quota while preserving most of the degree-based allocation's total outcome.