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Reasonable uncertainty: Confidence intervals in empirical Bayes discrimination detection

Published: August 18, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2508.13110v1

By: Jiaying Gu, Nikolaos Ignatiadis, Azeem M. Shaikh

Potential Business Impact:

Finds how much unfairness is really there.

We revisit empirical Bayes discrimination detection, focusing on uncertainty arising from both partial identification and sampling variability. While prior work has mostly focused on partial identification, we find that some empirical findings are not robust to sampling uncertainty. To better connect statistical evidence to the magnitude of real-world discriminatory behavior, we propose a counterfactual odds-ratio estimand with a attractive properties and interpretation. Our analysis reveals the importance of careful attention to uncertainty quantification and downstream goals in empirical Bayes analyses.

Page Count
13 pages

Category
Economics:
Econometrics