  The use of data-driven decision support by public agencies is becoming more
widespread and already influences the allocation of public resources. This
raises ethical concerns, as it has adversely affected minorities and
historically discriminated groups. In this paper, we use an approach that
combines statistics and data-driven approaches with dynamical modeling to
assess long-term fairness effects of labor market interventions. Specifically,
we develop and use a model to investigate the impact of decisions caused by a
public employment authority that selectively supports job-seekers through
targeted help. The selection of who receives what help is based on a
data-driven intervention model that estimates an individual's chances of
finding a job in a timely manner and rests upon data that describes a
population in which skills relevant to the labor market are unevenly
distributed between two groups (e.g., males and females). The intervention
model has incomplete access to the individual's actual skills and can augment
this with knowledge of the individual's group affiliation, thus using a
protected attribute to increase predictive accuracy. We assess this
intervention model's dynamics -- especially fairness-related issues and
trade-offs between different fairness goals -- over time and compare it to an
intervention model that does not use group affiliation as a predictive feature.
We conclude that in order to quantify the trade-off correctly and to assess the
long-term fairness effects of such a system in the real-world, careful modeling
of the surrounding labor market is indispensable.
