Precarity: Modeling the Long Term Effects of Compounded Decisions on Individual Instability

TL;DR

This paper introduces a modeling framework to simulate how compounded decisions impact individual instability over time, emphasizing the importance of the decision subject's perspective and policy interventions to reduce precarity.

Contribution

It presents a novel simulation-based framework focusing on long-term precarity effects from the decision subject's viewpoint, diverging from traditional aggregate measures.

Findings

Precarity varies across income classes due to negative decision impacts.

Policy interventions can mitigate long-term precarity effects.

Negative decisions have heterogeneous, long-lasting effects on individuals.

Abstract

When it comes to studying the impacts of decision making, the research has been largely focused on examining the fairness of the decisions, the long-term effects of the decision pipelines, and utility-based perspectives considering both the decision-maker and the individuals. However, there has hardly been any focus on precarity which is the term that encapsulates the instability in people's lives. That is, a negative outcome can overspread to other decisions and measures of well-being. Studying precarity necessitates a shift in focus - from the point of view of the decision-maker to the perspective of the decision subject. This centering of the subject is an important direction that unlocks the importance of parting with aggregate measures to examine the long-term effects of decision making. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a modeling framework that simulates the effects of compounded decision-making on precarity over time. Through our simulations, we are able to show the heterogeneity of precarity by the non-uniform ruinous aftereffects of negative decisions on different income classes of the underlying population and how policy interventions can help mitigate such effects.