Do job seekers value procedure in AI hiring only for error correction? Evidence from a conjoint experiment

Abstract

Employers increasingly delegate initial screening to automated systems, which in many cases reject an application before any human reads it. Acceptance of such systems plausibly depends both on how well they perform and on the procedure that produces the decision. Prior studies rarely vary procedure and performance independently, leaving it unclear whether applicants value procedure for its own sake or for the errors it corrects. In a preregistered paired-profile conjoint experiment, 1,919 United States job seekers made eight choices between systems with independently randomized levels of decision authority, error rate, explanation, opt-out, appeal, and independent bias audit. The value of the appeal, the opt-out, and the bias audit did not rise as wrongful rejections became more common, each staying within a preregistered equivalence bound. Human involvement carried more weight than any procedural feature, moving stated choice about as much as cutting wrongful rejections from 30% to 10%. These patterns constrain a simple error-correction account and are consistent with applicants valuing procedure partly for its own sake, so that improving a system's performance does not substitute for a right applicants can invoke.