Papers
Topics
Authors
Recent
Gemini 2.5 Flash
Gemini 2.5 Flash
133 tokens/sec
GPT-4o
7 tokens/sec
Gemini 2.5 Pro Pro
46 tokens/sec
o3 Pro
4 tokens/sec
GPT-4.1 Pro
38 tokens/sec
DeepSeek R1 via Azure Pro
28 tokens/sec
2000 character limit reached

Insights From Insurance for Fair Machine Learning (2306.14624v2)

Published 26 Jun 2023 in cs.LG and cs.CY

Abstract: We argue that insurance can act as an analogon for the social situatedness of machine learning systems, hence allowing machine learning scholars to take insights from the rich and interdisciplinary insurance literature. Tracing the interaction of uncertainty, fairness and responsibility in insurance provides a fresh perspective on fairness in machine learning. We link insurance fairness conceptions to their machine learning relatives, and use this bridge to problematize fairness as calibration. In this process, we bring to the forefront two themes that have been largely overlooked in the machine learning literature: responsibility and aggregate-individual tensions.

Definition Search Book Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com
References (138)
  1. Kenneth S. Abraham. Efficiency and fairness in insurance risk classification. Virginia Law Review, 71(3):403–451, 1985.
  2. Martin Marchman Andersen and Morten Ebbe Juul Nielsen. Luck egalitarianism, universal health care, and non-responsibility-based reasons for responsibilization. Res Publica, 21:201–216, 2015.
  3. Machine bias: There’s software used across the country to predict future criminals, and it’s biased against blacks. ProPublica, 2016. URL https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing. Accessed on June 2, 2023.
  4. Chris Armstrong. Equality, risk and responsibility: Dworkin on the insurance market. Economy and Society, 34(3):451–473, 2005.
  5. Kenneth J. Arrow. Uncertainty and the welfare economics of medical care. The American Economic Review, 53(5):941–973, 1963.
  6. John L. Austin. How to Do Things With Words. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1962.
  7. Ronen Avraham. Discrimination and insurance. In The Routledge Handbook of the Ethics of Discrimination. Routledge, 2018.
  8. Understanding insurance antidiscrimination law. Southern California Law Review, 87:195–274, 2013. URL https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/faculty_articles/576. Accessed on June 2, 2023.
  9. Tom Baker. On the genealogy of moral hazard. Texas Law Review, 75:237, 1996.
  10. Tom Baker. Insuring morality. Economy and Society, 29(4):559–577, 2000.
  11. Tom Baker. Risk, insurance, and the social construction of responsibility. University of Chicago Press, 2002.
  12. Embracing risk: The changing culture of insurance and responsibility. University of Chicago Press, 2002.
  13. Fairness and Machine Learning: Limitations and Opportunities. 2019. URL http://www.fairmlbook.org. Accessed on January 5, 2024.
  14. Laurence Barry. The rationality of the digital governmentality. Journal for Cultural Research, 23(4):365–380, 2019.
  15. Laurence Barry. Insurance, big data and changing conceptions of fairness. European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 61(2):159–184, 2020.
  16. The fairness of machine learning in insurance: New rags for an old man? arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.08112, 2022.
  17. Reuben Binns. On the apparent conflict between individual and group fairness. In Proceedings of the 2020 conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency, pp.  514–524, 2020.
  18. Better in theory than in practise? challenges when applying the luck egalitarian ethos in health care policy. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 23:735–742, 2020.
  19. Enacting dismal science: New perspectives on the performativity of economics. Springer, 2016.
  20. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. The MIT Press, 2000.
  21. Nicolas Brisset. Economics is not always performative: some limits for performativity. Journal of Economic Methodology, 23(2):160–184, 2016.
  22. Laure Cabantous. Ambiguity aversion in the field of insurance: Insurers’ attitude to imprecise and conflicting probability estimates. Theory and Decision, 62(3):219–240, 2007.
  23. Michel Callon (ed.). The laws of the markets. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
  24. A clarification of the nuances in the fairness metrics landscape. Scientific Reports, 12, 2022. Article number: 4209.
  25. From pool to profile: Social consequences of algorithmic prediction in insurance. Big Data & Society, 7(2):1–11, 2020.
  26. From actuarial to behavioural valuation. the impact of telematics on motor insurance. Valuation Studies, 9(1):109–139, 2022.
  27. Arthur Charpentier. Insurance: Discrimination, biases & fairness. Opinions & Debates, 2022. URL https://www.institutlouisbachelier.org/en/insurance-discrimination-biases-fairness/. Accessed on June 2, 2023.
  28. AIDS and insurance: the rationale for AIDS-related testing. Harvard Law Review, 100(7):1806–1825, 1987.
  29. Probability, gambling and the origins of risk management. Financial History Magazine, 93:10–11, 2009.
  30. Fairness is not static: deeper understanding of long term fairness via simulation studies. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp.  525–534, 2020.
  31. Norman Daniels. Insurability and the HIV epidemic: ethical issues in underwriting. The Milbank Quarterly, 68(4):497–525, 1990.
  32. Lorraine Daston. Classical Probability in the Enlightenment. Princeton University Press, 2023.
  33. Philip Dawid. On individual risk. Synthese, 194(9):3445–3474, 2017.
  34. Bruno de Finetti. Theory of probability: A critical introductory treatment. John Wiley & Sons, 1974/2017.
  35. Mitchell Dean. Risk, calculable and incalculable. Soziale Welt, pp.  25–42, 1998.
  36. Autocalibration and Tweedie-dominance for insurance pricing with machine learning. Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, 101:485–497, 2021.
  37. Alain Desrosières. The politics of large numbers: A history of statistical reasoning. Harvard University Press, 1998.
  38. Introduction: The sociology of quantification — perspectives on an emerging field in the social sciences. Historical Social Research, 41(2):7–26, 2016.
  39. Pricing ambiguity in catastrophe risk insurance. The Geneva Risk and Insurance Review, 46(2):112–132, 2021.
  40. Better together? how externalities of size complicate notions of solidarity and actuarial fairness. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp.  185–195, 2021.
  41. Fairness through awareness. In Proceedings of the 3rd Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference, pp.  214–226, 2012.
  42. Benjamin Eidelson. Patterned inequality, compounding injustice, and algorithmic prediction. American Journal of Law and Equality, 1:252–276, 2021.
  43. The moral hazards of neo-liberalism: lessons from the private insurance industry. Economy and Society, 29(4):532–558, 2000.
  44. Rankings and reactivity: How public measures recreate social worlds. American Journal of Sociology, 113(1):1–40, 2007.
  45. A sociology of quantification. European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 49(3):401–436, 2008.
  46. François Ewald. Die Versicherungs-Gesellschaft. Kritische Justiz, 22(4):385–393, 1989.
  47. François Ewald. Norms, discipline, and the law. Representations, 30:138–161, 1990.
  48. Francois Ewald. Insurance and risk. In The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality, pp. 197–210. The University of Chicago Press, 1991.
  49. François Ewald. L’État providence. Grasset, 1986.
  50. The discriminating (pricing) actuary. North American Actuarial Journal, 27(1):2–24, 2023.
  51. Sylvestre Frezal. Alea and heterogeneity: the tyrannous conflation, 2016. URL https://www.chaire-pari.fr/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Alea-and-Heterogeneity_the-Tyrannous-Conflation_eng_MEP.pdf. Accessed on June 14, 2023.
  52. Fairness in uncertainty: Some limits and misinterpretations of actuarial fairness. Journal of Business Ethics, 167:127–136, 2020.
  53. Rachel Z. Friedman. Probable Justice: Risk, Insurance, and the Welfare State. University of Chicago Press, 2020.
  54. Jill Gaulding. Race, sex and genetic discrimination in insurance: What’s fair? Cornell Law Review, 80:1646, 1994.
  55. Ackerlof George A. The market for lemons: Quality uncertainty and the market mechanism. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 84(3):488–500, 1970.
  56. The empire of chance: How probability changed science and everyday life. Cambridge University Press, 1989.
  57. Brian J. Glenn. Postmodernism: the basis of insurance. Risk Management and Insurance Review, 6(2):131–143, 2003a.
  58. Brian J. Glenn. Risk, insurance, and the changing nature of mutual obligation. Law & Social Inquiry, 28(1):295–314, 2003b.
  59. Ben Green. Escaping the impossibility of fairness: From formal to substantive algorithmic fairness. Philosophy & Technology, 35, 2022. Article number: 90.
  60. Doing statistics, enacting the nation: The performative powers of categories. Nations and nationalism, 26(3):576–593, 2020.
  61. Enactment or performance? a non-dualist reading of Goffman. In Beyond Interpretivism? New Encounters with Technology and Organization: IFIP WG 8.2 Working Conference on Information Systems and Organizations, IS&O 2016, pp.  167–181. Springer, Cham, 2016.
  62. Alan Hájek. The reference class problem is your problem too. Synthese, 156:563–585, 2007.
  63. Performative power. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, volume 35, pp.  22969–22981, 2022.
  64. Algorithmic collective action in machine learning. In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML’23. 2023.
  65. Direct fit to nature: An evolutionary perspective on biological and artificial neural networks. Neuron, 105(3):416–434, 2020.
  66. A moral framework for understanding fair ML through economic models of equality of opportunity. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp.  181–190, 2019.
  67. Carol Anne Heimer. Reactive risk and rational action: Managing moral hazard in insurance contracts. University of California Press, 1985.
  68. What was fair in actuarial fairness? History of the Human Sciences, 33(2):91–114, 2020.
  69. On the richness of calibration. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp.  1124–1138. 2023.
  70. A short-term intervention for long-term fairness in the labor market. In Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference, pp. 1389–1398, 2018.
  71. What’s sex got to do with machine learning? In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp.  513, 2020.
  72. Robert Huseby. Can luck egalitarianism justify the fact that some are worse off than others? Journal of Applied Philosophy, 33(3):259–269, 2016.
  73. Renée Jorgensen. Algorithms and the individual in criminal law. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 52(1):61–77, 2022.
  74. Fairness in learning: Classic and contextual bandits. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, volume 29. 2016.
  75. Atoosa Kasirzadeh. Algorithmic fairness and structural injustice: Insights from feminist political philosophy. In Proceedings of the 2022 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, AIES ’22, pp.  349–356, New York, NY, USA, 2022. Association for Computing Machinery. ISBN 9781450392471.
  76. Avoiding discrimination through causal reasoning. In Advances in neural information processing systems, volume 30, 2017.
  77. Inherent Trade-Offs in the Fair Determination of Risk Scores. In 8th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2017), volume 67, pp.  43:1–43:23, 2017.
  78. Carl Knight. Luck egalitarianism. Philosophy Compass, 8(10):924–934, 2013.
  79. Greta R. Krippner. Unmasked: A history of the individualization of risk. Sociological Theory, pp.  83–104, 2023.
  80. The person of the category: the pricing of risk and the politics of classification in insurance and credit. Theory and Society, 51(5):685–727, 2022.
  81. Distributive justice and fairness metrics in automated decision-making: How much overlap is there? arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.01441, 2021.
  82. Xavier Landes. The normative foundations of (social) insurance: Technology, social practices and political philosophy. 2013. URL https://www.centroeinaudi.it/images/abook_file/WP-LPF_6_2013_Landes.pdf. Accessed on June 14, 2023.
  83. Xavier Landes. How fair is actuarial fairness? Journal of Business Ethics, 128:519–533, 2015.
  84. Insurance, equality and the welfare state: Political philosophy and (of) public insurance. Res Publica, 21:111–118, 2015.
  85. Sharon M. Lee. Racial classifications in the US census: 1890–1990. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 16(1):75–94, 1993.
  86. The forms and limits of insurance solidarity. Journal of Business Ethics, 103:33–44, 2011.
  87. Producing solidarity, inequality and exclusion through insurance. Res publica, 21(2):155–169, 2015.
  88. Editorial: Insurance and the economization of uncertainty journal. Journal of Cultural Economy, 7(4):532–540, 2014.
  89. Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen. Genetic discrimination and health insurance. Res Publica, 21(2):185–199, 2015.
  90. Delayed impact of fair machine learning. In International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 3150–3158, 2018.
  91. Jyri Liukko. Genetic discrimination, insurance, and solidarity: an analysis of the argumentation for fair risk classification. New Genetics and Society, 29(4):457–475, 2010.
  92. Choosing how to discriminate: Navigating ethical trade-offs in fair algorithmic design for the insurance sector. Philosophy & Technology, 34:967–992, 2021.
  93. Deborah Lupton. The diverse domains of quantified selves: self-tracking modes and dataveillance. Economy and Society, 45(1):101–122, 2016.
  94. Donald MacKenzie. An engine, not a camera: How financial models shape markets. MIT Press, 2008.
  95. Do economists make markets?: on the performativity of economics. Princeton University Press, 2008.
  96. Uskali Mäki. Performativity: Saving austin from mackenzie. In EPSA11 perspectives and foundational problems in philosophy of science, pp.  443–453, 2013.
  97. Liz McFall. A ‘good, average man’: Calculation and the limits of statistics in enrolling insurance customers. The Sociological Review, 59(4):661–684, 2011.
  98. Liz McFall. Personalizing solidarity? the role of self-tracking in health insurance pricing. Economy and Society, 48(1):52–76, 2019.
  99. Who, or what, is insurtech personalizing?: persons, prices and the historical classifications of risk. Distinktion: journal of social theory, 19(2):193–213, 2018.
  100. Editorial: The personalisation of insurance: Data, behaviour and innovation. Big Data & Society, 7(2):1–11, 2020.
  101. A survey on bias and fairness in machine learning. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 54(6):1–35, 2021.
  102. What’s new with numbers? sociological approaches to the study of quantification. Annual Review of Sociology, 45:223–245, 2019.
  103. Enacting actuarial fairness in insurance: From fair discrimination to behaviour-based fairness. Science as Culture, 27(4):413–438, 2018.
  104. Killing the law of large numbers: Mortality risk premiums and the sharpe ratio. Journal of Risk and Insurance, 73(4):673–686, 2006.
  105. Michael J. Miller. Disparate impact and unfairly discriminatory insurance rates. In Casualty Actuarial Society E-Forum, Winter 2009, 2009.
  106. Algorithmic fairness: Choices, assumptions, and definitions. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application, 8:141–163, 2021.
  107. Annemarie Mol. The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice. Duke University Press, 2002.
  108. Price and the person: Markets, discrimination, and personhood. Journal of Cultural Economy, 11(6):501–513, 2018.
  109. G. Cristina Mora. Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American. University of Chicago Press, 2014.
  110. Performative prediction. In International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 7599–7609, 2020.
  111. Alois Pichler. Insurance pricing under ambiguity. European Actuarial Journal, 4(2):335–364, 2014.
  112. Shifting solidarities: Personalisation in insurance and medicine. Shifting solidarities: Trends and developments in European societies, pp.  127–151, 2020.
  113. Neoliberal governance and ‘responsibilization’ of agents: reassessing the mechanisms of responsibility-shift in neoliberal discursive environments. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 18(2):215–235, 2017.
  114. Tim Räz. Group fairness: Independence revisited. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp.  129–137, 2021.
  115. The right to underwrite gender: The goods & services directive and the politics of insurance pricing. Tijdschrift Voor Genderstudies, 18(4):413–431, 2015.
  116. Florian Rechfeld. Personalised genetic testing and its impact to insurance. Swiss Re, 2016. URL https://www.swissre.com/dam/jcr:24995a5d-5b66-42ea-a2b9-660458bc6e26/Personalised_genetic_testing_and_its_impact_to_insurance.pdf. Accessed on June 14, 2023.
  117. Hans Reichenbach. The Theory of Probability: An Inquiry Into the Logical and Mathematical Foundations of the Calculus of Probability. University of California Press, 1949.
  118. Pierre Rosanvallon. The New Social Question: Rethinking the Welfare State. Princeton University Press, 2000.
  119. The long arc of fairness: Formalisations and ethical discourse. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp.  2179–2188, 2022.
  120. Fairness and abstraction in sociotechnical systems. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp.  59–68. Association for Computing Machinery, 2019.
  121. Ronen Shamir. The age of responsibilization: On market-embedded morality. Economy and Society, 37(1):1–19, 2008.
  122. Tamar Sharon. Self-tracking for health and the quantified self: Re-articulating autonomy, solidarity, and authenticity in an age of personalized healthcare. Philosophy & Technology, 30(1):93–121, 2017.
  123. Deborah A. Stone. Ad missions. The American Prospect, 2001. URL https://prospect.org/health/ad-missions/. Accessed on May 17, 2023.
  124. Rick Swedloff. Risk classification’s big data (r) evolution. Connecticut Insurance Law Journal, 143:339–373, 2014.
  125. Maiju Tanninen. Contested technology: Social scientific perspectives of behaviour-based insurance. Big Data & Society, 7(2):1–14, 2020.
  126. Fairness and equality in insurance classification. The Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance-Issues and Practice, 31(2):190–211, 2006.
  127. Ine Van Hoyweghen. On the politics of calculative devices: performing life insurance markets. Journal of Cultural Economy, 7(3):334–352, 2014.
  128. Ine Van Hoyweghen. Genomics and insurance: The lock-in effects of a politics of genetic solidarity. In Handbook of Genomics, Health and Society, pp.  203–211. Routledge, 2018.
  129. Making the normal deviant: The introduction of predictive medicine in life insurance. Social Science & Medicine, 63(5):1225–1235, 2006.
  130. Genetic ‘risk carriers’ and lifestyle ‘risk takers’. which risks deserve our legal protection in insurance? Health Care Analysis, 15:179–193, 2007.
  131. John Venn. The Logic of Chance. MacMillan, 1876.
  132. Unravelling the predictive power of telematics data in car insurance pricing. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C (Applied Statistics), 67(5):1275–1304, 2018.
  133. Ed Vosselman. The ‘performativity thesis’ and its critics: Towards a relational ontology of management accounting. Accounting and Business Research, 44(2):181–203, 2014.
  134. Kate Vredenburgh. Fairness. In The Oxford Handbook of AI Governance. Oxford University Press, 2022.
  135. Michael A. Walters. Risk classification standards. In Proceedings of the Casualty Actuarial Society, volume 68, pp.  1–18, 1981.
  136. David Wilkie. Mutuality and solidarity: assessing risks and sharing losses. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences, 352(1357):1039–1044, 1997.
  137. Jon Williamson. A dynamic interaction between machine learning and the philosophy of science. Minds and Machines, 14(4):539–549, 2004.
  138. Xi Xin and Fei Huang. Antidiscrimination insurance pricing: Regulations, fairness criteria, and models. North American Actuarial Journal, pp.  1–35, 2023.
Citations (4)

Summary

We haven't generated a summary for this paper yet.