Social Foundations of Computation Conference Paper 2025

To Give or Not to Give? The Impacts of Strategically Withheld Recourse

Thumb ticker sm 20240912 yatong chen full image
Social Foundations of Computation
  • Research Group Leader

Individuals often aim to reverse undesired outcomes in interactions with automated systems, like loan denials, by either implementing system-recommended actions (recourse), or manipulating their features. While providing recourse benefits users and enhances system utility, it also provides information about the decision process that can be used for more effective strategic manipulation, especially when the individuals collectively share such information with each other. We show that this tension leads rational utility-maximizing systems to frequently withhold recourse, resulting in decreased population utility, particularly impacting sensitive groups. To mitigate these effects, we explore the role of recourse subsidies, finding them effective in increasing the provision of recourse actions by rational systems, as well as lowering the potential social cost and mitigating unfairness caused by recourse withholding.

Author(s): Chen, Yatong and Estornell, Andrew and Vorobeychik, Yevgeniy and Liu, Yang
Book Title: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTAS)
Year: 2025
Month: May
Publisher: PMLR
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)
Event Name: The Twenty-Eight International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS)
State: Published
URL: https://proceedings.mlr.press/v258/chen25a.html
Links:

BibTex

@inproceedings{chen2025give,
  title = {To Give or Not to Give? The Impacts of Strategically Withheld Recourse},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTAS)},
  abstract = {Individuals often aim to reverse undesired outcomes in interactions with automated systems, like loan denials, by either implementing system-recommended actions (recourse), or manipulating their features. While providing recourse benefits users and enhances system utility, it also provides information about the decision process that can be used for more effective strategic manipulation, especially when the individuals collectively share such information with each other. We show that this tension leads rational utility-maximizing systems to frequently withhold recourse, resulting in decreased population utility, particularly impacting sensitive groups. To mitigate these effects, we explore the role of recourse subsidies, finding them effective in increasing the provision of recourse actions by rational systems, as well as lowering the potential social cost and mitigating unfairness caused by recourse withholding. },
  publisher = {PMLR},
  month = may,
  year = {2025},
  slug = {chen2025give},
  author = {Chen, Yatong and Estornell, Andrew and Vorobeychik, Yevgeniy and Liu, Yang},
  url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v258/chen25a.html},
  month_numeric = {5}
}