The Many Faces of Fairness: Exploring the Institutional Logics of Multistakeholder Microlending Recommendation.

Recommender systems have a variety of stakeholders. Applying concepts of fairness in such systems requires attention to stakeholders' complex and often-conflicting needs. Since fairness is socially constructed, there are numerous definitions, both in the social science and machine learning literatures. Still, it is rare for machine learning researchers to develop their metrics in close consideration of their social context. More often, standard definitions are adopted and assumed to be applicable across contexts and stakeholders. Our research starts with a recommendation context and then seeks to understand the breadth of the fairness considerations of associated stakeholders. In this paper, we report on the results of a semi-structured interview study with 23 employees who work for the Kiva microlending platform. We characterize the many different ways in which they enact and strive toward fairness for microlending recommendations in their own work, uncover the ways in which these different enactments of fairness are in tension with each other, and identify how stakeholders are differentially prioritized. Finally, we reflect on the implications of this study for future research and for the design of multistakeholder recommender systems.