Achieving Fairness

This book mainly aims at solving the problems in both cooperative and competitive multi-agent systems (MASs), exploring aspects such as how agents can effectively learn to achieve the shared optimal solution based on their local information and how they can learn to increase their individual utility by exploiting the weakness of their opponents. The book describes fundamental and advanced techniques of how multi-agent systems can be engineered towards the goal of ensuring fairness, social optimality, and individual rationality; a wide range of further relevant topics are also covered both theoretically and experimentally. The book will be beneficial to researchers in the fields of multi-agent systems, game theory and artificial intelligence in general, as well as practitioners developing practical multi-agent systems.

CSMA-based wireless mesh networks are vulnerable to collisions. Even a single unicast flow can exhibit excessive collisions from hidden terminals. Furthermore, fairness objectives for single-hop networks can cause undesirable behaviors for mesh networks. Mesh networks of wireless sensors suffer from undesirable protocol interactions due to these challenges. Inter-protocol collisions and unfair channel usage between protocols cause the behavior of one protocol to change depending on other protocols. These inter-protocol interactions complicate the design of large sensor network systems. Motivated by these problems, this dissertation presents grant-to-send, a novel collision avoidance mechanism for wireless mesh networks. Rather than announce packets it intends to send, a node using grant-to-send announces packets it expects to hear others send. This dissertation provides evidence that inverting collision avoidance in this way greatly improves wireless mesh performance without significant overhead. Grant-to-send is simple to implement, and is compatible with existing hardware. Grant-to-send is also general enough to replace protocol-specific collision avoidance mechanisms common to sensor network protocols. While these individual mechanisms only avoid intra-protocol collisions, grant-to-send provides a MAC mechanism which can address both intra- and inter-protocol collisions. This dissertation also proposes a fairness scheme for mesh networks, which can be applied to protocol fairness. The fairness scheme combines and modifies traditional flow-based fairness techniques such as fair queueing and fair scheduling. However, the complexities of wireless make these mechanisms insufficient by themselves. This dissertation therefore proposes two new mechanisms that address these limitations, channel decay and fair cancellation, and shows that the fairness scheme can significantly improve protocol fairness. Together, this dissertation shows that achieving collision avoidance and fairness can make mesh networks perform better, more reliable, and thus easier to design.

The purpose of this volume is to help jump-start an urgently needed conversation about fairness and justice in access to higher education to counteract the ubiquitous mantras of neoliberal globalization and managerialism. The book seeks to carve out a strong moral and normative basis for opposing mainstream developments that engender increasing inequality and market-dependency in higher education. The book’s chapters consider how different national communities channel access to higher education, what their “implicit social contracts” are, and what outcomes are produced by different policies and methods. The book is essential reading for scholars of higher education and students concerned with increasing inequality in a globalizing educational marketplace.

This volume considers the way in which the focus on individual rights may constitute an obstacle to ensuring fairness in criminal proceedings. The increasingly cosmopolitan nature of criminal justice, forcing legal systems with different institutional forms and practices to interact with each other as they attempt to combat crime beyond national borders, has accentuated the need for systems to seek legitimacy beyond their domestic traditions. Fairness, expressed in terms of the right to a fair trial in provisions such as Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, has emerged across Europe as the principal means of guaranteeing the legitimacy of criminal proceedings. The consequence of this is that criminal procedure doctrines are framed overwhelmingly in 'constitutional' terms – the protection of defence rights is necessary to restrict and legitimate the state's mandate to prosecute crime. Yet there are various problems with relying solely or predominantly on defence rights as a means of ensuring that proceedings are 'fair' or legitimate and these issues are rarely discussed in the academic literature. In this volume, scholars from the disciplines of law, philosophy and sociology challenge various normative assumptions underpinning our understanding of fairness in criminal proceedings.

What is a fair distribution of resources and other goods when individuals are partly responsible for their achievements? This book develops a theory of fairness incorporating a concern for personal responsibility, opportunities and freedom. With a critical perspective, it makes accessible the recent developments in economics and philosophy that define social justice in terms of equal opportunities. It also proposes new perspectives and original ideas. The book separates mathematical sections from the rest of the text, so that the main concepts and ideas are easily accessible to non-technical readers. It is often thought that responsibility is a complex notion, but this monograph proposes a simple analytical framework that makes it possible to disentangle the different concepts of fairness that deal with neutralizing inequalities for which the individuals are not held responsible, rewarding their effort, respecting their choices, or staying neutral with respect to their responsibility sphere. It dwells on paradoxes and impossibilities only as a way to highlight important ethical options and always proposes solutions and reasonable compromises among the conflicting values surrounding equality and responsibility. The theory is able to incorporate disincentive problems and is illustrated in the examination of applied policy issues such as: income redistribution when individuals may be held responsible for their choices of labor supply or education; social and private insurance when individuals may be held responsible for their risky lifestyle; second chance policies; the measurement of inequality of opportunities and social mobility.

This new Report concludes that market access begins at home. It argues that further reducing barriers to trade between developing countries needs to be an essential part of the way forward. The report is the first of an annual series on market access issues and focuses on reducing global poverty by improving market entry and trade transparency for developing countries. In this Report, a new methodology was applied, offering more accurate estimates of global poverty distribution and the impact of export growth on poverty.