Jensen Speaker Series: Barbara Kiviat

Jensen Speaker Series

Barbara Kiviat is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Columbia University.

Moral Desert in the Market: Asymmetric Fairness in Algorithmic Pricing

"Companies increasingly use personal data and algorithmic prediction to set prices and allocate resources. Like all market arrangements, these practices require moral justification. In insurance, this justification has a name: actuarial fairness. In this talk, I leverage the case of credit scoring in car insurance pricing—an early and controversial use of algorithmic prediction—to show how people resist actuarial fairness by mobilizing notions of moral desert. Then, I show how they do this asymmetrically, focusing on times when bad credit is undeserved, while almost entirely ignoring times when good credit is undeserved. Drawing on years of public policy debate and dozens of state laws, I show that while policymakers extensively regulate credit scoring, this asymmetry in moral reasoning is one reason they have almost no success in banning credit scoring entirely."