Search papers, labs, and topics across Lattice.
This paper introduces the concept of hermeneutical fairness, derived from Miranda Fricker's work on hermeneutical injustice, to the problem of ad delivery. It models ad delivery as a mechanism that distributes interpretative resources, and proposes a group-level hermeneutical fairness constraint and a hermeneutically aware utility cost to mitigate hermeneutical deprivation and distortion. Through simulations using a utility-driven ad allocation framework, the authors demonstrate the trade-offs between economic utility, distributive fairness, and hermeneutical cost, showing that purely utility-based allocation can disadvantage certain groups.
Online advertising can harm users not just through unequal distribution of opportunities, but also by systematically depriving certain groups of relevant concepts or saturating them with skewed framings.
Fairness in online advertising is often formalized as a distributive justice problem, aiming to ensure that impressions, opportunities, or outcomes are allocated comparably across protected groups. Yet online advertising can still produce harms arising from ads'content and from how recipients interpret and uptake them. To capture this dimension, we draw on Miranda Fricker's notion of hermeneutical injustice. We model ad delivery as a mechanism that distributes interpretative resources and can fail in two ways: relevant concepts can be withheld through systematic under-exposure, leading to hermeneutical deprivation; and recipients may experience hermeneutical distortions when saturated with low-uptake or skewed framings. Grounded in exploratory correlational patterns from the AIDS Advertising Evaluation surveys (1986-1987), we introduce a group-level hermeneutical fairness constraint and a hermeneutically aware utility cost. We integrate them into a benchmark, utility-driven ad allocation framework that already enforces distributive justice, yielding a distributively fair, hermeneutically aware framework that prevents deprivation and distortion from concentrating within protected groups. Through controlled simulations, we explore trade-offs between economic utility, classical distributive fairness constraints, and hermeneutical cost. The results show that purely utility-based allocation drives under-delivery to the disadvantaged group. When the hermeneutical stakes of withholding ads are high, distributive constraints reduce hermeneutical cost at modest utility loss. Conversely, weighting hermeneutical cost without distributive constraints can yield policies concentrated on the disadvantaged group. These findings motivate expanding fairness analyses of online advertising beyond distributive notions to include epistemic conditions of interpretation and uptake.
