Recorded 22 January 2024. John Hooker of Carnegie Mellon University presents "Equity through Social Welfare Optimization" at IPAM's Mathematical Foundations for Equity in Transportation Systems Workshop. Abstract: This talk explores how an equitable distribution of benefits and costs might be achieved through optimization of a social welfare function (SWF). Such a function can be embedded in an optimization or machine learning model to obtain a fair solution, or used to assess the outcome of such a model for fairness. Emphasis is placed on SWFs that combine equity and efficiency, including alpha fairness (including the special case of proportional fairness, or the Nash bargaining solution), the Kalai-Smorodinsky bargaining solution, and recently proposed threshold functions. Structural properties of optimal solutions are derived, as a guide to selecting a suitable SWF for a given application. An assessment of popular group parity metrics used in AI is also presented, based on SWF analysis. Learn more online at: https://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/workshops/mathematical-foundations-for-equity-in-transportation-systems-january-22-26-2024/?tab=overview