Gerrymandering Individual Fairness

Abstract: Individual fairness, proposed by Dwork et al., is a fairness measure that is supposed to prevent the unfair treatment of individuals on the subgroup level, and to overcome the problem that group fairness measures are susceptible to manipulation, or gerrymandering. The goal of the present paper is to explore the extent to which it is possible to gerrymander individual fairness itself. It will be proved that gerrymandering individual fairness in the context of predicting scores is possible. It will also be argued that individual fairness provides a very weak notion of fairness for some choices of feature space and metric. Finally, it will be discussed how the general idea of individual fairness may be preserved by formulating a notion of fairness that allows us to overcome some of the problems with individual fairness identified here and elsewhere.