Law Commons^™

Big Data And Discrimination, Talia B. Gillis, Jan L. Speiss

Faculty Scholarship

The ability to distinguish between people in setting the price of credit is often constrained by legal rules that aim to prevent discrimination. These legal requirements have developed focusing on human decision-making contexts, and so their effectiveness is challenged as pricing increasingly relies on intelligent algorithms that extract information from big data. In this Essay, we bring together existing legal requirements with the structure of machine-learning decision-making in order to identify tensions between old law and new methods and lay the ground for legal solutions. We argue that, while automated pricing rules provide increased transparency, their complexity also limits the …