Fairness Considerations Research Articles

Effects of facial trustworthiness and gender on decision making in the Ultimatum Game

As little is yet known about the influence of facial trustworthiness and gender on fairness consideration in decision making, we examined whether a proposer's facial trustworthiness and gender would influence a responder's willingness to accept the proposer's monetary offer. Participants in our study were 79 Chinese undergraduate students (responders) who played the Ultimatum Game with 4 proposers (2 male and 2 female) with different facial trustworthiness. As predicted, responders were more willing to accept offers from trustworthy-looking proposers. We found that facial trustworthiness was a more salient cue when proposers were men than when they were women and, furthermore, that the students' emotional response to faces was correlated with their fairness consideration. Considering the implicit influence of facial trustworthiness and gender on decision making, potentially there are broader implications of our findings for certain business activities, such as negotiation and bargaining.

Social Support Modulates Neural Responses to Unfairness in the Ultimatum Game.

The current functional MRI study aimed to investigate how responders’ fairness considerations and related decision-making processes were affected by social support in the ultimatum game (UG). During scanning, responders either played the standard UG with proposers (control condition) or played the modified UG in which three unknown observers showed social support for responders by acknowledging proposers’ norm violation. Results revealed that participants reported higher unfairness feelings and rejection rates of unfair offers in the social support condition relative to the control condition. At the neural level, compared to the control condition, perception of social support from others induced greater activations of anterior cingulate gyrus and right anterior insula when receiving unfair (vs. fair) offers. The medial prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula were more active when the unfair offers were rejected (vs. accepted) in the social support condition than the control condition. These results highlighted the modulation effect of social support on responders’ fairness considerations and related decision-making processes.

Team Incentives, Task Assignment, and Performance: A Field Experiment

The performance of a work team commonly depends on the effort exerted by the team members as well as on the division of tasks among them. However, when leaders assign tasks to team members, performance is usually not the only consideration. Favouritism, employees' seniority, employees' preferences over tasks, and fairness considerations often play a role as well. Team incentives have the potential to curtail the role of these factors in favor of performance -- in particular when the incentive plan includes both the leader and the team members. This paper presents the results of a field experiment designed to study the effects of such team incentives on task assignment and performance. We introduce team incentives in a random subsets of 108 stores of a Dutch retail chain. We find no effect of the incentive, neither on task assignment nor on performance.

A New Adaptive Data Center Resource Provisioning Scheme Based on the Dual-Level Cooperative Game Approach

With the popularity of 5G network technology, cloud computing paradigm in data center (DC) networks has drawn increased attention. DC is a pool of computational and storage resources interconnected using a communication network. To handle the growing demands of cloud computing services, resources in DC should be used efficiently. In this paper, we design a new DC resource provisioning scheme based on the cooperative game theory. Using the matching game model and Mood value, we propose new resource allocation algorithms, which attempt to equalize users’ satisfactions with respect to an effective distribution of the DC resource. Due to the competitive and coordinative DC environments, our proposed game approach can adaptively respond to the current cloud computing service requests. The main novelty possessed by our resource provisioning scheme is to capture the dynamics of DC network operations with the consideration of efficiency and fairness. Finally, we show the advantages of our proposed scheme through computer simulations. Comparing with other existing protocols, performance evaluations demonstrate that our game-based approach can outperform the existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of DC resource usability, service success ratio and fairness. In addition, we provide the guidance on the future research direction including other issues.

Joint User Association and Power Allocation for Cell-Free Visible Light Communication Networks

As a complementary technology for conventional radio frequency communication, visible light communication (VLC) is a potential form of the optical wireless communication, which can provide both communication and illumination simultaneously. Since load balancing and power control for interference management are key challenges in the network deployment, we consider a joint user association and power allocation scheme in a cell-free VLC network to improve the system performance. It is mathematically formulated as a non-convex network utility maximization problem in consideration of the user fairness, load balancing, and power control. To tackle this non-convex problem, we divide it into two subproblems (i.e., the user association subproblem and the power allocation subproblem) and solve them with the dual projected gradient algorithm and successive convex approximation algorithm iteratively until a stationary point is found. Simulation results verify that significant gain can be achieved with the proposed scheme compared with the user association schemes without consideration of the power control.

Trade Unions As Suppliers of Goods and Services

Trade unions are important vehicles through which social justice is achieved in the South African society. They play a role in the social, political, and economic spheres. Trade unions are powerful institutions and many provide a wide variety of services and goods to their members, having extended their activities to financial services such as insurance, pension funds, and health products. Some unions have questioned the constitutionality of limiting workers to a particular pension fund which has the effect of impinging on their freedom of association.1 Section 5(6) of the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 (‘the CPA’) forms part of the application provisions of the Act. The aim of the section is to provide ‘greater certainty’ regarding the scope of application of the CPA. It provides that the supply of any goods or services in the ordinary course of business to any of its members by a club, trade union, association, society, or other collective entity, whether incorporated or not, of persons voluntarily associated and organised for a common purpose or purposes, whether for fair value consideration or otherwise, irrespective of whether there is a charge or economic contribution demanded or expected in order to become or remain a member of that entity, will fall under the Act. This section implies that the goods and services provided by trade unions to their members are subject to the Act, and has fundamental implications for trade unions and their members. This contribution illustrates the development and extended role that trade unions play, not only with regard to labour relations, but also as the suppliers of goods and services to their members.

Reading Paul with the Reformers: Reconciling Old and New Perspectives by Stephen J. Chester

Reviewed by: Reading Paul with the Reformers: Reconciling Old and New Perspectives by Stephen J. Chester R. David Nelson Reading Paul with the Reformers: Reconciling Old and New Perspectives. By Stephen J. Chester. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017. xxi + 478 pp. At least since the appearance of Krister Stendahl's famous 1963 essay on "The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West," Luther and the other Protestant Reformers have been eyed with great suspicion by scholars of the New Testament, particularly those doing research on Paul's letters. Proponents of the so-called "New Perspective on Paul," which has flourished in biblical studies circles for the past four decades, often situate themselves aggressively against what is normally shorthanded as "the Lutheran perspective" on Paul's theology. Luther and Lutheran exegesis frequently are singled out as paragons of the "old" perspective which now must be abandoned in light of the findings of up-to-date critical research into Paul's life, literary deposit, and contexts. Stendahl—ironically enough, an ordained Lutheran clergyman and the bishop of Stockholm for four years in the 1980s—essentially incited this trend in Pauline interpretation when, in the aforementioned programmatic essay, he charged Luther with shoe-horning New Testament exegesis into the narrowly defined role of addressing the problem of the private, introspective conscience. When this is accepted prima facie as the extent of Luther's exegetical imagination, the history of interpretation since Luther becomes conceived as something of a comedy of errors, as the Reformer's exegetical miscues are—at least as the story goes—perpetuated by subsequent generations of Protestant interpreters. Never mind that such narratives of the putatively "Lutheran" perspective on Paul [End Page 224] typically are recounted without nuance or the support of careful scientific study of the Reformation period. By consequence (and as Chester helpfully demonstrates), the Reformation-era exegetes are, more often than not these days, swiftly and carelessly faulted by biblical scholars on three scores: as in Stendahl's assessment, they confine the problem of New Testament soteriology to the crisis of the introspective conscience; they misread (with drastic repercussions centuries later) the Jewish backgrounds of Paul's thought; and they deflate Paul's rich theology of justification by reducing it to a private, forensic exchange. The great virtue of Reading Paul with the Reformers is Chester's sustained thesis that "the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century have insights into the interpretation of the Pauline letters that can assist us as we attempt to interpret the same texts in and for contemporary contexts" (1). While acknowledging that the reformers erred in some of their exegetical judgments, Chester resists the supposition that the Reformation trajectory of Pauline interpretation can be rejected summarily as an obstacle to the correct understanding of the Apostle's letters. Chester's countermove unfolds in four steps, beginning with a fascinating study of the sixteenth–century debates over the nature of scripture which took place between Luther and Erasmus. Chester uses this episode from the history of interpretation to good effect, showing that the quarrels between Luther and Erasmus bear significant entailments for today's tensions between theological and historical-critical modes of biblical exegesis. In the book's second large unit, he explores the continuities and discontinuities between Reformation-era exegesis and the interpretative practices of the medieval period, suggesting that the metaphor of "grammatical structure" can be used aptly to describe the paradigm shift in exegesis which took place in the sixteenth century. Accordingly, the reformers positioned their own views on particular topics and concepts over against the antecedent tradition, effectively introducing a new exegetical grammar that would go on to shape the Protestant tradition of interpretation for generations. In the third unit, Chester carefully examines specific components of this exegetical grammar as they emerge in the [End Page 225] works of Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin. His analysis uncovers many shortcomings in the reformers' exegesis. But key insights from Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin—often overlooked by contemporary scholars—shine forth here and are given fair and due consideration. This sets the stage for the final unit, in which Chester explores how Reformation exegesis, when properly understood and appreciated, might impact the study...

Integrating social justice concerns into economic evaluation for healthcare and public health: A systematic review

Social justice is the moral imperative to avoid and remediate unfair distributions of societal disadvantage. In priority setting in healthcare and public health, social justice reaches beyond fairness in the distribution of health outcomes and economic impacts to encompass fairness in the distribution of policy impacts upon other dimensions of well-being. There is an emerging awareness of the need for economic evaluation to integrate all such concerns. We performed a systematic review (1) to describe methodological solutions suitable for integrating social justice concerns into economic evaluation, and (2) to describe the challenges that those solutions face. To be included, publications must have captured fairness considerations that (a) involve cross-dimensional subjective personal life experience and (b) can be manifested at the level of subpopulations. We identified relevant publications using an electronic search in EMBASE, PubMed, EconLit, PsycInfo, Philosopher's Index, and Scopus, including publications available in English in the past 20 years. Two reviewers independently appraised candidate publications, extracted data, and synthesized findings in narrative form. Out of 2388 publications reviewed, 26 were included. Solutions sought either to incorporate relevant fairness considerations directly into economic evaluation or to report them alongside cost-effectiveness measures. The majority of reviewed solutions, if adapted to integrate social justice concerns, would require their explicit quantification. Four broad challenges related to the implementation of these solutions were identified: clarifying the normative basis; measuring and determining the relative importance of criteria representing that basis; combining the criteria; and evaluating trade-offs. All included solutions must grapple with an inherent tension: they must either face the normative and operational challenges of quantifying social justice concerns or accede to offering incomplete policy guidance. Interdisciplinary research and broader collaborations are crucial to address these challenges and to support due attention to social justice in priority setting.

Big Data and Personalised Price Discrimination in EU Competition Law

Big Data and Personalised Price Discrimination in EU Competition Law

Content-independence and natural-duty theories of political obligation

This paper contends that the requirement of content independence poses a pressing challenge to natural-duty theories of political obligation, for it is unclear why subjects of a state should not discharge the background natural duty in proper ways other than obeying the law. To demonstrate the force of this challenge, I examine and refute three argumentative strategies to achieve content independence represented in recent notable natural-duty theories: by appealing to the epistemic advantages of the state in discharging a natural duty, by claiming that one’s denial of state authority necessarily poses an unjust threat to other people, and by invoking the consideration of fairness (or impartiality) to preempt one’s discretion in discharging a natural duty. My criticisms, I believe, provide sufficient reasons for natural-duty theorists to take the requirement of content independence much more seriously.

Fairness in International Trade Policy: Equality and Differential Treatment in Theory and Practice

In Fairness in Practice – A Social Contract for a Global Economy (2012) Aaron James proposes a substantial normative framework for a theory of fairness in the global economy. Based on a distinctive methodology of interpretive constructivism, James argues for an internal justification of fairness requirements in the field of international trade, and consequently defends three basic egalitarian principles of fairness. However, Mathias Risse and Gabriel Wollner, among others, have criticized James’s view for multiple reasons. In the following article, I will first engage with their critique, contending that their arguments do not prove that James’s view should be dismissed. Instead, I will introduce a new proposal, arguing that it is rather by a notion of differential treatment of countries that James’s account should be complemented. Taking into account all the relevant differences between countries, the concept of differential treatment allows for the provision and establishment of equal participation as a basis for considerations of fairness. To this end, I shall therefore propose an additional fourth principle of fairness called Equal Participation. I argue that it is necessary to significantly expand James’s contractualist and practice-dependent foundations, in order to reconcile crucial methodological concerns and to render James’s formulations applicable to current debates on free trade agreements. The article will conclude with an exploration of the applicability of this new approach to current trade policy issues, illustrating not only its practicability but also the urgent need for normative considerations in the context of international trade agreements.

Gerrymandering and Association

This article argues that the First Amendment expressive right of association prohibits excessive partisan gerrymanders. For decades, the Court has struggled to articulate a manageable standard for partisan gerrymandering claims. Justice Kennedy’s concurring opinion in Vieth v. Jubelirer suggested that the First Amendment might provide a more promising basis for such a claim than equal protection. The issue is now before the Court in Gill v. Whitford and Benisek v. Lamone. The right of association has long been understood to limit the dominant political group’s ability to discriminate against its rivals. For over four decades, the Court has understood that voting implicates the right of association, at least in some contexts. The article develops the argument for challenging partisan gerrymanders as a violation of the First Amendment right of association, focusing on the party-based character of the harm and an administrable effects-based legal standard. It explains how the legal standard developed in other voting contexts might be extended and applied to cases challenging excessive partisanship in drawing district lines. Expressive association provides the strongest constitutional basis for challenging partisan gerrymandering for three reasons. The first is that it best captures the character of the injury, which inheres in party-based discrimination – more specifically, the dominant political party’s attempt to entrench itself at the expense of the rival major party and its supporters. Second, the legal standard adopted in voting-as-association cases focuses on effect rather than intent, avoiding the thorny challenge of discerning legislative intent. Third, the voting-as-association cases provide an appropriately nuanced standard. The balancing test that the Court has adopted in its voting-as-association cases allows fair consideration of both the burdens that the challenged practice has on the non-dominant party, as well as the state interests that might justify these burdens.

Team Incentives, Task Assignment, and Performance: A Field Experiment

The performance of a work team commonly depends on the effort exerted by the team members as well as on the division of tasks among them. However, when leaders assign tasks to team members, performance is usually not the only consideration. Favouritism, employees' seniority, employees' preferences over tasks, and fairness considerations often play a role as well. Team incentives have the potential to curtail the role of these factors in favor of performance -- in particular when the incentive plan includes both the leader and the team members. This paper presents the results of a field experiment designed to study the effects of such team incentives on task assignment and performance. We introduce team incentives in a random subsets of 108 stores of a Dutch retail chain. We find no effect of the incentive, neither on task assignment nor on performance.

Learning‐based resource allocation in D2D communications with QoS and fairness considerations

AbstractIn device‐to‐device (D2D) communications, D2D users establish a direct link by utilizing the cellular users' spectrum to increase the network spectral efficiency. However, due to the higher priority of cellular users, interference imposed by D2D users to cellular ones should be controlled by channel and power allocation algorithms. Due to the unknown distribution of dynamic channel parameters, learning‐based resource allocation algorithms work more efficient than classic optimization methods. In this paper, the problem of the joint channel and power allocation for D2D users in realistic scenarios is formulated as an interactive learning problem, where the channel state information of selected channels is unknown to the decision center and learned during the allocation process. In order to achieve the maximum reward function by choosing an action (channel and power level) for each D2D pair, a recency‐based Q‐learning method is introduced to find the best channel‐power for each D2D pair. The proposed method is shown to achieve logarithmic regret function asymptotically, which makes it an order optimal policy, and it converges to the stable equilibrium solution. The simulation results confirm that the proposed method achieves better responses in terms of network sum rate and fairness criterion in comparison with conventional learning methods and random allocation.

What's wrong with using steroids? Exploring whether and why people oppose the use of performance enhancing drugs.

The use of performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) elicits widespread normative opposition, yet little research has investigated what underlies these judgments. We examine this question comprehensively, across 13 studies. We first test the hypothesis that opposition to PED use cannot be fully accounted for by considerations of fairness. We then test the influence of 10 other potential drivers of opposition in an exploratory manner. We find that health risks for the user and rules and laws prohibiting use of anabolic steroids reliably affect normative judgments. Next, we test whether these patterns generalize to a different PED-cognitive-enhancement drugs. Finally, we sketch a framework for understanding these results, borrowing from Social Domain Theory (e.g., Turiel, 1983). We argue that PED use exemplifies a class of violations with properties of moral, conventional, and prudential offenses. This research sheds light on a widespread, but understudied, normative judgment, and illustrates the utility of exploratory methods. (PsycINFO Database Record

Applying Public Trust Thinking to Wildlife Governance in the United States: Challenges and Potential Solutions

ABSTRACTPublic trust thinking (PTT) promises to inspire ecologically and socially responsible wildlife governance in the United States, but its application is not straightforward. We describe eight broad challenges to comprehensive application of PTT including: increasing authority and capacity; overcoming resistance to change; achieving fair consideration of all public interests; facilitating broad public participation; and fulfilling commitments to future generations. We discuss potential solutions including: distributing responsibilities for public wildlife conservation among governmental and nongovernmental entities; adopting an expansive definition of “wildlife;” promoting an inclusive interpretation of PTT among public wildlife professionals; rejuvenating relationships between the public and wildlife agencies; and increasing public participation and accountability in decision-making processes. Efforts to address challenges in specific socioecological contexts should be led by people working in those contexts. Achieving comprehensive application of PTT will require collaboration and cooperation among governmental and nongovernmental partners, supported by diverse and engaged members of the public.

Increasing Block Tariffs in the Water Sector – An Interpretation in Terms of Social Preferences

Abstract Many developing countries around the world apply progressive water tariffs, often structured in the form of discretely increasing block tariffs (IBTs). These tariffs have been criticized in the welfare economic literature due to their perceived inefficiency: many of the prices charged under IBTs do not correspond to marginal costs and thus violate the principle of allocative efficiency. In this paper we explore an alternative interpretation of the widespread use of IBTs, in terms of social preferences and fairness considerations. For this, we rely on an extension of the Fehr, E., and K. Schmidt (1999. “A Theory of Fairness, Competition, and Cooperation.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 114: 817–868.) utility function, including inequality aversion, to which we add another parameter representing a reference for redistribution which reflects a societal preference to correct for income difference perceived as unfair. Additionally, the model includes a variable on household size, finding that, as poor households are on average larger, a simple IBT tariff disregarding household size may not be “fair”.

Hello handsome! Male's facial attractiveness gives rise to female's fairness bias in Ultimatum Game scenarios-An ERP study.

The current study delineated how male proposers’ facial attractiveness affect female responders’ fairness considerations and their subsequent decision outcome during the Ultimatum Game (UG). Event Related Potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 17 female subjects, who played the role as responders and had to decide whether to accept offers from either attractive or unattractive male proposers. Behavioral data (Acceptance Ratio and Response time) revealed that, more offers were accepted from attractive-face conditions; subjects typically responded quicker to unfair offers from unattractive proposers as compared with slower to unfair offers from attractive proposers. The ERP data demonstrated similar N2 amplitudes elicited by both attractive and unattractive faces, and a larger early frontal LPP elicited by the attractive faces compared with unattractive ones, but no significant differences of both late posterior LPP and typical parietal LPP amplitudes were observed between these two face conditions, which was different from our previous study with similar paradigm but male participants. The results suggest that, in comparison to males, females might not experience the potential attention bias towards unattractive opposite-sex faces and are less likely to possess an enhanced processing and evaluation of those faces. This phenomenon might be explained by endogenous gender differences in mate preference. The feedback-related negativity (FRN) and P300 responses during an offer presentation were further measured in both attractive-face and unattractive-face conditions and the results demonstrated that the amplitudes elicited by fair and unfair offers were not statistically different in the former condition, but were different in the latter condition. More specifically, unfair offers generated larger FRN and smaller P300 than fair ones in the unattractive-face condition. Findings suggest that, although females tend to possess less salient evaluation of male’s facial attractiveness, the attractiveness of male proposers would still attenuate female responders’ fairness consideration during the UG.

The Fairness ‘Dilemma’ in Sharing the Nile Waters: What Lessons from the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam for International Law?

This monograph enquires into the fairness dilemma in connection with the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (gerd) in light of relevant colonial-era Nile treaties, post-1990 Nile framework instruments, and international watercourses law. Thegerdis now afait accompli, but fairness considerations will continue to be vital issues in its completion, filling, and operation. The monograph argues that thegerdis a symbol of a fair share of the Nile waters by Ethiopia, the realization of which depends on,inter alia, an appropriate economic return, benefit sharing and prevention of significant impacts. The monograph also calls for a process to address the issue of unfair agreements, and argues that, although fairness application can be complex, the notions of procedural fairness and distributive justice can be applied to define and delineate the principle with reference to a specific treaty regime.

Autonomous adaptation to riverine flooding in Satkhira District, Bangladesh: implications for adaptation planning

Systematic understanding of adaptation measures utilised by households in developing countries is needed to identify the constraints they face, and the external interventions or adaptation planning needed to overcome them. Understanding of autonomous household adaptation patterns remains underdeveloped. In particular, little is known regarding whether households are implementing incremental or transformational adaptation measures as well as the implications of this for adaptation planning. We demonstrate the suitability of the risk hazard approach for understanding autonomous household adaptation patterns and discuss the implications for planned adaptation. To achieve this, we use an in-depth village case study from an area of Bangladesh particularly vulnerable to climate change, using qualitative semi-structured household interviews as primary material. We find that the risk hazard approach is ideal for exploring autonomous adaptations because of its capacity for understanding how households respond to livelihood risk, and what resources are required for it to be most effective. However, the risk hazard approach overlooks equity and fairness considerations need to be integrated due to the insufficient emphasis on these concerns.