arXiv:2611.08995v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used to resolve consumer complaints, and the way complainants write varies with age, education and socioeconomic status (SES). We audit three remedy-decision systems using sociolinguistic rewrites of US consumer financial complaints that are instructed to preserve every fact: two generative LLMs that return a single label (GPT-4o-mini and GPT-5-mini) and a probabilistic "System One" model that returns a distribution over remedies (Jev). Using pre-registered hypotheses tested once on held-out complaints, we separate two phenomena that single-label audits conflate. At the group scale, older, college-educated and higher-SES styles receive slightly more generous remedies; these effects replicate but are small, with every monetary-remedy gap within 0.5 percentage points. At the individual scale, two style versions of the same complaint receive different monetary decisions 2.6-6.3% of the time. In a variance-component analysis of the probabilistic model, persona components shared across the two rewrite models account for about 1.6% of within-complaint variation. The persona gaps are associated mainly with delivery (vocabulary, grammar, politeness) rather than content. Positive controls show that all three systems respond 49-387 times more strongly to remedy-relevant facts than to style. Rewriting every complaint into one standard style reduced GPT-4o-mini's education and SES gaps by 94% and 87% while retaining fact sensitivity, but reversed two of the probabilistic model's gaps and did not make individual decisions more stable. Independent LLM auditors flagged material fact changes in 3.3% and 11.7% of rewrites, and instability persisted among unflagged rewrites. Fairness audits of LLM decision systems should report group disparities and individual instability as separate outcomes.
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used to resolve consumer complaints, and the way complainants write varies with age, education and socioeconomic status (SES). We audit three remedy-decision systems using sociolinguistic rewrites of US consumer financial complaints that are instructed to preserve every fact: two generative LLMs that return a single label (GPT-4o-mini and GPT-5-mini) and a probabilistic "System One" model that returns a distribution over remedies (Jev). Using pre-registered hypotheses tested once on held-out complaints, we separate two phenomena that single-label audits conflate. At the group scale, older, college-educated and higher-SES styles receive slightly more generous remedies; these effects replicate but are small, with every monetary-remedy gap within 0.5 percentage points. At the individual scale, two style versions of the same complaint receive different monetary decisions 2.6-6.3% of the time. In a variance-component analysis of the probabilistic model, persona components shared across the two rewrite models account for about 1.6% of within-complaint variation. The persona gaps are associated mainly with delivery (vocabulary, grammar, politeness) rather than content. Positive controls show that all three systems respond 49-387 times more strongly to remedy-relevant facts than to style. Rewriting every complaint into one standard style reduced GPT-4o-mini's education and SES gaps by 94% and 87% while retaining fact sensitivity, but reversed two of the probabilistic model's gaps and did not make individual decisions more stable. Independent LLM auditors flagged material fact changes in 3.3% and 11.7% of rewrites, and instability persisted among unflagged rewrites. Fairness audits of LLM decision systems should report group disparities and individual instability as separate outcomes.
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Same Facts, Different Remedy: Linguistic Profiling and Arbitrariness in LLM and System One Decisions