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What is fair? Proxy discrimination vs. demographic disparities in insurance pricing
Stockholm University, Faculty of Science, Department of Mathematics.ORCID iD: 0000-0001-7235-384x
Number of Authors: 42024 (English)In: Scandinavian Actuarial Journal, ISSN 0346-1238, E-ISSN 1651-2030, Vol. 2024, no 9, p. 935-970Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Discrimination and fairness are major concerns in algorithmic models. Thisis particularly true in insurance, where protected policyholder attributes arenot allowed to be used for insurance pricing. Simply disregarding protectedpolicyholder attributes is not an appropriate solution as this still allows forthe possibility of inferring protected attributes from non-protected covari-ates, leading to the phenomenon of proxy discrimination. Although proxydiscrimination is qualitatively different from the group fairness conceptsdiscussed in the machine learning and actuarial literature, group fairnesscriteria have been proposed to control the impact of protected attributeson the calculation of insurance prices. The purpose of this paper is to discussthe relationship between direct and proxy discrimination in insurance andthe most popular group fairness axioms. We provide a technical definitionof proxy discrimination and derive incompatibility results, showing thatavoiding proxy discrimination does not imply satisfying group fairness andvice versa. This shows that the two concepts are materially different. Fur-thermore, we discuss input data pre-processing and model post-processingmethods that achieve group fairness in the sense of demographic parity.As these methods induce transformations that explicitly depend on poli-cyholders’ protected attributes, it becomes ambiguous whether direct andproxy discrimination is, in fact, avoided.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2024. Vol. 2024, no 9, p. 935-970
Keywords [en]
Discrimination, fairness, indirect discrimination, input preprocessing, optimal transport, output post-processing, proxy discrimination, Wasserstein distance
National Category
Economics
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:su:diva-236066DOI: 10.1080/03461238.2024.2364741ISI: 001250509200001Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85196401999OAI: oai:DiVA.org:su-236066DiVA, id: diva2:1918876
Available from: 2024-12-06 Created: 2024-12-06 Last updated: 2024-12-06Bibliographically approved

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