A Framework to Maximize Group Fairness for Workers on Online Labor Platforms

• Published in: Data science and engineering 2023-06, Vol.8 (2), p.146-176
• Main Authors: Rabaa, Anis El, Elbassuoni, Shady, Hanna, Jihad, Mouawad, Amer E., Olleik, Ayham, Amer-Yahia, Sihem
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithm Analysis and Problem Complexity; Algorithms; Artificial Intelligence; Chemistry and Earth Sciences; Computer engineering; Computer Science; Crowdsourcing; Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery; Database Management; Employment; Group fairness; Job hunting; Job provider; Job seeker; Labor; Matching; Online labor platforms; Optimization; Physics; Platforms; Research Paper; Statistics for Engineering; Synthetic data; Systems and Data Security; Workers
• ISSN: 2364-1185; 2364-1541
• DOI: 10.1007/s41019-023-00213-y

As the number of online labor platforms and the diversity of jobs on these platforms increase, ensuring group fairness for workers needs to be the focus of job-matching services. Risk of discrimination against workers occurs in two different job-matching services: when someone is looking for a job (i.e., a job seeker) and when someone wants to deploy jobs (i.e., a job provider). To maximize their chances of getting hired, job seekers submit their profiles on different platforms. Similarly, job providers publish their job offers on multiple platforms with the goal of reaching a wide and diverse workforce. In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework to maximize group fairness for workers 1) when job seekers are looking for jobs on multiple platforms, and 2) when jobs are being deployed by job providers on multiple platforms. We formulate each goal as different optimization problems with different constraints, prove most of them are computationally hard to solve and propose various efficient algorithms to solve all of them in reasonable time. We then design a series of experiments that rely on synthetic and semi-synthetic data generated from a real-world online labor platform to evaluate our framework.