In education a new dimension started after the 1994 elections by implementing new legislation to ensure fair conduct towards all. New labour legislation was promulgated to contribute to fairness in South Africa. This legislation was also implemented in the South African education system to ensure that educators are treated fairly. The Employment of Educators Act (EEA), the Labour Relations Act (LBA), the Equity Act and the South African Schools Act (SASA) were promulgated to protect both the rights of the employer and the educator in education. The purpose of this research was to determine the perception of educators in the Oudtshoorn district regarding fairness in the workplace; how educators understand and experience their right to equality in the workplace; what their perception is regarding disciplinary action in the workplace, and to what extent educators have the basic concept and principle of labour law to prevent frustration in the workplace and ineffective service delivery, and to prevent the pursuit of incorrect procedures. It is crucial that the educator knows his or her rights as an employee, and what his or her obligations towards the employer are. This research was done on the basis of the literature study and the analysis of legislation that is applicable to educators. A qualitative enquiry into educators’ perceptions of fairness in the workplace was conducted amongst participants from the Oudtshoorn district, which included schools from different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. This case study was based on interviews with school managers, educators on post level 1 and with union representatives in the Oudtshoorn district. Questionnaires were structured to obtain the participants’ view and perception on fairness in the workplace and to determine their knowledge regarding the law and their rights in education with regards to labour law. The participants didn’t receive guidance because it could have influenced their answers. The data derived from the participants made it possible to compile certain recommendations and conclusions. From the empirical research it was evident that educators in the Oudtshoorn district had but a vague knowledge of their rights as educators and of legislation. Shortcomings that were apparent from this study were addressed, recommendations were made, and possible future research on related topics was indicated. / MEd (Education Law), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

The objective of the study was to examine the relationships between the concepts of personal fairness and social fairness and hotel cancellation policies. These relationships will be explored using the framework of Prospect Theory in terms of consumer patronage (willingnessto-purchase and word-of-mouth). This study begins with a brief history of the development of the lodging industry in the United States from inns and taverns to the modern hotel industry that is a critical sector of the hospitality and tourism economy. Current statistics are provided regarding the U.S. and Central Florida hotel industry in order to provide both a national and local economic perspective. The study also provides relevant statistics regarding U.S. domestic traveller information. The included literature review consists of concepts of mental accounting theory, economic utility theory, prospect theory, personal fairness, social fairness, and consumer patronage. The study also discusses how the lodging industry is unique in its implementation of reservation cancellation policies when compared against other industries. Research regarding merchandise return policies is also discussed here. The study was designed to investigate three separate components of both personal and social fairness. The first component investigated the effects of hotel rate price increases and discounts on personal fairness when compared against an existing reference price. The second component studied the perceptions of social fairness on three established hotel cancellation policies. The third component introduces a treatment of distributive and procedural fairness violations as a moderator to observe the effects on consumer patronage for the same three hotel cancellation policies. iv The data were collected from 415 hotel guests staying in Central Florida hotels near the Orlando international airport using an experimental method which provided different written scenarios regarding hotel pricing and three different hotel cancellation policies. The data was then analyzed using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), MANOVA and Tukey’s Post Hoc test to provide results that allowed the comparison of effects on each in terms of consumer patronage. The study results indicated that that price increases against established reference prices had a significant negative effect on consumer patronage whereas discounts of the same magnitude had a significant effect only in the middle range. Included smaller and large discounts did not have a significant effect on consumer patronage outside of the middle range. The study results also indicated that there was significant difference in consumer patronage between an Open cancellation policy and a 48 Hour Cancellation Policy. There is a significant difference in consumer patronage when a No Refund policy is compared against both the Open Cancellation Policy and the 48 Hour Cancellation Policy. The study results also show that a violation of either Distributive Fairness or Procedural Fairness has a significant negative effect on consumer patronage for both an Open Cancellation policy and 48 Hour Cancellation Policy. However, when Distributive Fairness or Procedural Fairness violations are introduced as a moderator, there is no significant effect on a No Refund Cancellation Policy. The study and its ensuing results are of importance to the academic community in that it provides additional scholarly support to both Prospect Theory and the theory of mental accounting and the roles that each plays in consumer behavior. From an industry practitioner perspective, the current results provide insight into hotel consumer’s attitudes regarding rate increases/ discounts and the implementation of the three different hotel cancelation policies. The v results can be utilized to provide justification and guidance in altering or establishing hotel cancellation policies that hotel consumers consider to be fair.

This dissertation investigates how customer service providers identify psychologically with their customers, as well as how this identification is influenced by an organization's treatment of customers, and how customer identification ultimately affects service performance. Based on predictions made from relational models of fairness and social identity theory, I hypothesize that an employee's perceptions of organizational fairness antecede identity cognitions related to the organization and its customers, and that these identity variables then influence service behaviors. These predictions are tested in two lab studies utilizing a simulated electronic help desk experiment. Results show that an organization's customer-directed fairness affects an employee's customer identification, while employee-directed fairness affects organizational identification. Results also show that customer identification and organizational identification interact to affect the level of politeness demonstrated by service providers, and that customer-directed fairness influences pro-customer rule breaking independently of identity variables. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This dissertation constructs a "non-ideal theory" of justice: a systematic theory of how to respond justly to injustice. Chapter 1 argues that contemporary political philosophy lacks a non-ideal theory of justice, and defends a variation of John Rawls' famous original position - the Non-Ideal Original Position - as a method with which to construct such a theory. Finally, Chapter 1 uses the Non-Ideal Original Position to argue for a Fundamental Principle of Non-Ideal Theory: a principle that requires injustices to be dealt with in whichever way will best satisfy the preferences of all relevant individuals, provided those individuals are all rational, adequately informed, broadly moral, and accept the correct "ideal theory" of fully just conditions. Chapter 2 then argues for the Principle of Application - an epistemic principle that represents the Fundamental Principle's satisfaction conditions in terms of the aims of actual or hypothetical reformist groups. Chapters 3-5 then use these two principles to argue for substantive views regarding global/international justice. Chapter 3 argues that the two principles establish a higher-order human right for all other human rights to promoted and protected in accordance with the two principles of non-ideal theory. Chapter 4 argues that the two principles defeasibly require the international community to tolerate unjust societies, provided those societies respect the most basic rights of individuals. Finally, Chapter 5 argues that the two principles imply a duty of the international community to ameliorate severe poverty, as well as a duty to implement "fair trade" practices in international economics.

Fairness and justice are often used interchangeably in socio-legal research. The goal of this study was to use 157 student-produced examples of either "injustice" or "unfairness" to determine whether differences exist in the content of the stories, and by extension, the definitions of these terms, and on participants' scores on modified versions of Kohlberg and Gilligan's levels of moral development. As hypothesized, the two terms were related, yet significantly different, with "unfairness" stories highlighting violations of equality, and "injustice" stories highlighting legal interactions and violations of equity. Sex differences were also found such that females were more likely to write stories rated high on unfairness and therefore equality, but no sex differences were found in level of moral reasoning reached by this sample. Future research is aimed at developing theory to explain differences, including the possible innate nature of "fairness" and environmental requirements leading to a concept of "justice".

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The purpose of this paper is to discuss reciprocity and the role it plays in helping us understand interactions between parties in accounting settings. The concept of reciprocity states that individuals will reward kind behaviors and punish unkind behaviors. (Fisher et al. 2015; Fehr and Gächter 2000; Fehr and Gächter 1997). When trying to trace the origins of the theory of reciprocity, it is useful to track the initial constructs on which it is built from various literary sources. This process contributes to developing an understanding of how reciprocity is used to explain behaviors in the workplace. The notion of reciprocity has a long history and is defined in many iterations of social literature dating back to ancient philosophers. Roman politician Cicero, for example, stated: “there is no duty more indispensable than that of returning a kindness” and “all men distrust one forgetful of a benefit” (Gouldner 1960). This early philosophical sentiment exemplifies the integral role positive reciprocity plays in society and the potential avarice an individual may encounter when not returning positive actions with displays of positive reciprocity. Through this review, I gather literature that builds on the concept of reciprocity. I organize commonly found themes and organize settings previously used to focus on the multiple constructs to build upon reciprocity.

Master of Engineering (Research) / This thesis presents a new approach to ensuring fair service for highly concurrent requests. Our design uses the advantages of staged event-driven architecture (SEDA) to support high-concurrent loadings and makes use of control theory to manage the system performance. In order to guarantee the quality of service is fairly made to each request, based on SEDA, the control system for fairness is developed as a combination of a global control framework and a set of local self-tune stags. The global control framework is used to control the performance of the whole staged network at the top-level, aimed at coordinating the performance of the stages in the network. On the other hand, each self-tune stage under the control framework is built on the thread pool model, and will use automatic control theory to adjust its performance locally in order to meet the overall target performance. The automatic control system in each stage consists of an automatic modeling mechanism and a feedback module, which optimizes the controller parameters in the system automatically and guarantees the quality of performance (service rate here) for the stage at runtime. Based on mathematical proof and simulation results, our designs are implemented in a SEDA-based web server running in a dynamic loading environment. Results demonstrate that the performance of the new system in the real world is almost the same as the theoretical results. It demonstrates that the design is able to adaptively ensure the quality of service to the high-concurrent requests fairly. Compared to the original SEDA design, our design is an effective and handy approach to significantly enhancing the performance of SEDA in a variety of aspects, including fairer service, faster convergent speed, better robustness, higher accuracy and ease of deployment in various practical applications.

In standard contract-theoretic models, the underlying assumption is that an agent is purely selfish, and his objective is to maximize his own payoff. A large amount of empirical evidence has pointed out that many individuals are also motivated by other psychological considerations, such as fairness concerns and reciprocity. Theorists have been engaged in finding more realistic assumptions that are consistent with the ways in which economic agents behave in real life. Among the existing theories, the theory of inequity aversion developed by Fehr and Schmidt [35] has attracted enormous attention. It soon became a useful tool in behavioral contract theory, which capitalizes on the power of social preferences theories to enhance understanding of real-world contracting phenomena. The present thesis aims at contributing to the behavioral contract literature by investigating how inequality aversion preferences impact on the optimal contract design in a financial contracting environment and the agent's incentive in a career concerns experiment. Chapter 2 reviews some of the recent theoretical contributions to the development of the theories of reciprocity and fairness. Emphasis is placed on sketching the theories, demonstrating their abilities to explain experimental regularities and pointing out some potential problems that are inherent in the existing theories. In addition, we present a survey of the recent theoretical contributions linking inequality aversion and the theory of incentives, where the traditional selfish agent assumption is replaced by the more realistic assumption that the individual agent is also inequality-averse. Incorporating more realism into economic modelling, such as assuming some individuals are inequality-averse, appears to be a promising avenue for research in the theory of incentives, as it generates more refutable predictions that models based on the selfish agent assumption cannot offer. Chapter 3 analyzes a tractable two-period staged financing model in which a single principal interacts with an agent who is risk-neutral and inequality-averse, offering him an equity contract. We fully characterize the menu of the optimal sharing contracts. Our results show that inequality-aversion changes the structure of the optimal contract. More importantly, we show that it is more likely we will observe an equal sharing contract when the agent is inequality-averse. Our findings for efficiency comparison indicate that inequality-aversion exacerbates the distortions caused by moral hazard, which leads to a further downward distortion in terms of total social welfare in this staged financing context. Incorporating inequality-aversion into a dynamic staged financing game thus allows us to interpret real-world contractual arrangements in the venture capital industry where equal split contracts dominate. In Chapter 4, we revisit the innovative Holmström's-type career concerns experiment by Irlenbusch and Silwka [47]. In particular, we introduce inequality-aversion, a theoretical short cut for reciprocity, into the analysis and investigate if it is the missing link that potentially drives the results in the experiment. Two related but conceptually different models are considered. The complete information model confirms that inequality-aversion induces positive effort in the second period, but does not predict any differences in the effort choices across both periods in the revealed-ability setting. The incomplete information model's predictions conform more closely to the observations in the revealed-ability setting, and its predictions for the hidden-ability setting can partly explain the lower effort choices observed in the hidden-ability setting. Our analysis suggests that inequality-aversion is part of the missing link, but not all. Incorporating fairness intentions into the analysis should open more opportunities for explaining the experimental results in Irlenbusch and Silwka. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1339820 / Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, Business School, 2008