Causal Fairness for Outcome Control

As society transitions towards an AI-based decision-making infrastructure, an ever-increasing number of decisions once under control of humans are now delegated to automated systems. Even though such developments make various parts of society more efficient, a large body of evidence suggests that a great deal of care needs to be taken to make such automated decision-making systems fair and equitable, namely, taking into account sensitive attributes such as gender, race, and religion. In this paper, we study a specific decision-making task called outcome control in which an automated system aims to optimize an outcome variable $Y$ while being fair and equitable. The interest in such a setting ranges from interventions related to criminal justice and welfare, all the way to clinical decision-making and public health. In this paper, we first analyze through causal lenses the notion of benefit, which captures how much a specific individual would benefit from a positive decision, counterfactually speaking, when contrasted with an alternative, negative one. We introduce the notion of benefit fairness, which can be seen as the minimal fairness requirement in decision-making, and develop an algorithm for satisfying it. We then note that the benefit itself may be influenced by the protected attribute, and propose causal tools which can be used to analyze this. Finally, if some of the variations of the protected attribute in the benefit are considered as discriminatory, the notion of benefit fairness may need to be strengthened, which leads us to articulating a notion of causal benefit fairness. Using this notion, we develop a new optimization procedure capable of maximizing $Y$ while ascertaining causal fairness in the decision process

How does the franchisor’s choice of different control mechanisms affect franchisees’ and employee-managers’ satisfaction?

Satisfaction of franchisees and employee-managers affects the overall performance of a franchise system. We argue that different actors in the same franchise system need to be treated in different ways. The franchisor’s choice of control mechanisms affects the satisfaction of franchisees and employee-managers differently. Drawing on data from the largest German franchise system, we show that the effectiveness of different control mechanisms depends on actor type and experience. Outcome control leads to higher satisfaction among franchisees and employee-managers, while behavior control enhances employee-managers’ satisfaction. Thereby, outcome control leads to higher satisfaction among more experienced franchisees, while behavior control enhances both highly and lowly experienced employee-managers’ satisfaction. Our results suggest that franchisors face a dilemma: On the one hand, behavior control is associated with high costs and has no impact on franchisees’ satisfaction at all. On the other hand, it might still be necessary to prevent franchisees from behaving opportunistically

How does the franchisor’s choice of different control mechanisms affect franchisees’ and employee-managers’ satisfaction?

Satisfaction of franchisees and employee-managers affects the overall performance of a franchise system. We argue that different actors in the same franchise system need to be treated in different ways. The franchisor’s choice of control mechanisms affects the satisfaction of franchisees and employee-managers differently. Drawing on data from the largest German franchise system, we show that the effectiveness of different control mechanisms depends on actor type and experience. Outcome control leads to higher satisfaction among franchisees and employee-managers, while behavior control enhances employee-managers’ satisfaction. Thereby, outcome control leads to higher satisfaction among more experienced franchisees, while behavior control enhances both highly and lowly experienced employee-managers’ satisfaction. Our results suggest that franchisors face a dilemma: On the one hand, behavior control is associated with high costs and has no impact on franchisees’ satisfaction at all. On the other hand, it might still be necessary to prevent franchisees from behaving opportunistically

Service employee adaptiveness : exploring the impact of role-stress and managerial control approaches

The research aims to explore the relationships between managerial control strategies, role stress and employee adaptiveness among call center employees. Based on a conceptual model, a questionnaire based survey methodology is adopted. Data was collected from call center employees in India and the data was analysed through PLS methodology. The study finds that Outcome control and activity control increase role stress while capability control does not have a significant impact. The interaction between outcome control and activity control also tends to impact role stress of employees. Role stress felt by employees have significant negative impact on employee adaptiveness The sampling approach was convenience based affecting the generalizability of the results. The papers provides guidelines for utilising managerial control approaches in a service setting. The paper looks at managerial control approaches in a service setting – a topic not quite researched before

Understanding Client-Consultant Collaboration within Information Systems Design: A Case Study

This study provides an in-depth exploration of how clients and consultants collaborate in an outsourced design project and how this collaboration influenced the emerging design of an IS artifact. Findings show that the project development method (waterfall model) chosen on a macro-level (project delivery model) can cause a ripple effect that influences the client-consultant collaboration on a micro-level (design phase), which in turn, might influence the emerging design of the IS artifact. The findings suggest that the exercised control modes start with a high degree of self-control and reasonable outcome control. However, an increase in outcome control progresses over time if the measured outcome is perceived as poor by the client. Parallelly, the desire for behavioral control becomes more present.publishedVersio

On Negative Outcome Control of Unobserved Confounding as a Generalization of Difference-in-Differences

The difference-in-differences (DID) approach is a well known strategy for estimating the effect of an exposure in the presence of unobserved confounding. The approach is most commonly used when pre-and post-exposure outcome measurements are available, and one can assume that the association of the unobserved confounder with the outcome is equal in the two exposure groups, and constant over time. Then, one recovers the treatment effect by regressing the change in outcome over time on the exposure. In this paper, we interpret the difference-in-differences as a negative outcome control (NOC) approach. We show that the pre-exposure outcome is a negative control outcome, as it cannot be influenced by the subsequent exposure, and it is affected by both observed and unobserved confounders of the exposure-outcome association of interest. The relation between DID and NOC provides simple conditions under which negative control outcomes can be used to detect and correct for confounding bias. However, for general negative control outcomes, the DID-like assumption may be overly restrictive and rarely credible, because it requires that both the outcome of interest and the control outcome are measured on the same scale. Thus, we present a scale-invariant generalization of the DID that may be used in broader NOC contexts. The proposed approach is demonstrated in simulations and on a Normative Aging Study data set, in which Body Mass Index is used for NOC of the relationship between air pollution and inflammatory outcomes

Running on Hybrid: Control Changes when Introducing an Agile Methodology in a Traditional “Waterfall” System Development Environment

Prior to implementing “Agile” software development methods, organizations rooted in traditional “Waterfall” software development employed heavy upfront project design and limited changes and feedback during and between project stages. Waterfall methods make heavy use of outcome controls primarily monitored by the information systems function (ISF). This paper explores the control mechanisms used by the ISF and business function (BF) during and after the introduction of a major Agile project at a large U.S. company steeped in the traditional Waterfall method. Outcome control, the predominant control mechanism used in the case company, gave way to a hybrid-like control that possessed mechanisms of emergent control while maintaining vestiges of some Waterfall-like outcome control. We observed that, prior to the introduction of Agile, the software-development process was firmly in the hands of the ISF. The introduction of Agile shifted some of the controller authority over the development process from the ISF to the BF. Lessons learned from the case study point to the complexity of designing control mechanisms during a transition from the Waterfall method to an Agile approach