How to Govern Decisions Made by Algorithms and AI: Using Game Theory to Evaluate Regulatory Choices

Algorithms govern our lives both explicitly and implicitly. Explicitly, the public sector and governance institutions use algorithms, often outsourced to contractors, to fulfill their missions, such as allocating policing resources and determining prison sentencing. Implicitly, they govern many aspects of our lives, such as the shape of discourse in our digital public sphere, qualifications for loans, insurance premiums, employment eligibility, movie recommendations, the routes we drive to work, airline fares, college admissions, and more. With our lives increasingly shaped by digital platforms of social media and search engines, these opaque private-sector algorithms may be governing our lives more than the laws of our governments. The harms of these governing algorithms in the context of public sector and private sector use have been well documented. These algorithms lack transparency and legitimacy, and sometimes violate existing laws. This presents a situation where we must think through how to extend governance to be sure laws are maintained when algorithms are used. In this talk, we will see how we can use game theory to increase our understanding of how to govern these algorithms by exploring incentives and effects of different policies on how algorithms and AI are developed and deployed.