  The extensive adoption of business analytics (BA) has brought financial gains
and increased efficiencies. However, these advances have simultaneously drawn
attention to rising legal and ethical challenges when BA inform decisions with
fairness implications. As a response to these concerns, the emerging study of
algorithmic fairness deals with algorithmic outputs that may result in
disparate outcomes or other forms of injustices for subgroups of the
population, especially those who have been historically marginalized. Fairness
is relevant on the basis of legal compliance, social responsibility, and
utility; if not adequately and systematically addressed, unfair BA systems may
lead to societal harms and may also threaten an organization's own survival,
its competitiveness, and overall performance. This paper offers a
forward-looking, BA-focused review of algorithmic fairness. We first review the
state-of-the-art research on sources and measures of bias, as well as bias
mitigation algorithms. We then provide a detailed discussion of the
utility-fairness relationship, emphasizing that the frequent assumption of a
trade-off between these two constructs is often mistaken or short-sighted.
Finally, we chart a path forward by identifying opportunities for business
scholars to address impactful, open challenges that are key to the effective
and responsible deployment of BA.
