The diploma thesis deals with the concept of fairness perception by pupils of primary school. The aim of this work is to get to know the ways in which children at primary school think about fairness and what they consider fair and unfair. The theoretical part describes approaches to the topic in terms of psychology, pedagogy and ethics. The theoretical part consists of three main chapters. The first chapter deals with the concept of fairness and possible interpretations of this word. In the second chapter, the reader reads about the different concepts of moral reasoning. The thesis introduces the reader to the concept of moral development by Jean Piaget and the stage theory of Lawrence Kohlberg. The thesis also describes some theories of moral reasoning created by some of Kohlberg's followers or critics. The third chapter identifies some determinants that can influence moral reasoning when dealing with primary school pupils. The practical part consist of a research probe concerning the moral reasoning of pupils. This research probe works with a moral dilemma created by Jean Piaget. The moral dilemma concerns the perception of fairness and works with fair punishment. This dilemma is discussed with pupils in group interviews. The research probe was conducted with pupils of the second and third grade...

<div>This study explores the vertical relationships in the supply chain at three different levels, namely, firm-consumer interface, supplier-buyer interface, and firm-government interface. We provide a brief description of the results obtained for the specific problems considered in this study.</div><div><br></div><div><div>The firm-consumer interface is examined in Chapter 2. We explore firms’ selling strategy when dynamically competing for a common stream of consumers. In the situation of pure price competition, a commonly studied case, it is known that the </div><div>seller with a higher stock level can compete more effectively by forcing the seller with a lower stock level to sell out first and enjoy a monopoly power afterward. We show that when the sellers are open to price bargaining as a way of attracting buyers, the </div><div>competition equilibrium can exhibit different outcomes. When the overall stock held by the sellers is limited, there is a good chance that both sellers deplete the inventories before the end of the selling season. In this case, an incoming buyer would prefer a</div><div>high inventory seller, with whom he can bargain down the price. Interestingly, such a phenomenon only appears when the length of selling season is long enough. Thus, our study highlights the unique role of bargaining in consumer markets, as well as the importance of time horizon in characterizing equilibrium for dynamic games.</div></div><div><br></div><div>The supplier-buyer interface is studied in Chapter 3. In recent years, an increasing number of studies have applied the Nash bargaining (NB) solution to study channel relationships. However, this solution concept builds on an unrealistic axiom of independence of irrelevant alternatives. We demonstrate that, indeed, the NB solution can produce unreasonable outcomes in vertical negotiations. For example, a supplier negotiating with a monopoly retailer can end up making a higher profit than the one negotiating with a retailer facing potential competitions. To address this issue, we examine the Kalai-Smorodinsky (KS) solution as an alternative. Our analysis suggests that in competing supply chains, the KS solution appropriately captures the negotiation power shift induced by the decision ownership, the negotiation sequence, the vertical relationship, the competition intensity, the contract contingency, and the contract type. This is the first time the KS solution concept is applied to supply chain negotiations.<br></div><div><br></div><div>The firm-government interface is explored in Chapter 4. From the policymakers’ perspective, incentives firms actions toward increasing the product consumption for the needy group or increasing social welfare has a major influence in many supply chains. For example, agricultural products are subsidized by many governments. In this study, we analyze the design of government subsidy programs to induce socially improved firm decisions. We show that subsidizing on production input can lead to a more balanced distribution of market shares and firm profits than subsidizing on production output. Moreover, firms with efficient production technology prefer output subsidy, while those with inefficient production technology favor input subsidy<br></div>

Smart devices have become one of the fundamental communication and computing devices in people's everyday lives over the past decade. Their various sensors and wireless connectivity have paved the way for a new application area called mobile crowdsensing where sensing services are provided by using the sensor outputs collected from smart devices. A mobile crowdsensing system's service quality heavily depends on the participation of smart device users who probably expect to be compensated in return for their participation. Therefore, mobile crowdsensing applications need incentive mechanisms to motivate such people into participating. In this thesis, we first defined a reverse auction based incentive mechanism for a representative mobile crowdsensing system. Then, we integrated the Vickrey-Clarke- Groves mechanism into the initial incentive mechanism so as to investigate whether truthful bidding would become the dominant strategy in the resulting incentive mechanism. We demonstrated by theoretical analysis that overbidding was the dominant strategy in the base incentive mechanism, whereas truthful bidding was the dominant strategy in the derived incentive mechanism when the VCG mechanism was applicable. Finally, we conducted simulations of both incentive mechanisms in order to measure the fairness of service prices and the fairness of cumulative participant earnings using Jain's fairness index. We observed that both the fairness of service prices and the fairness of cumulative participant earnings were generally better in the derived incentive mechanism when the VCG mechanism was applied. We also found that at least 70% of service requests had fair prices, while between 5% and 85% of participants had fair cumulative earnings in both incentive mechanisms.

Bakgrund: Det svenska näringslivet präglas av digitalisering. Därtill har dagens företag anpassat sig efter omgivningen och bedriver sina processer mer digitalt. Inom området Human Resources är rekryteringsprocessen under digital konstruktion, med fördelar för företag i form av tid och kostnadseffektivitet. I denna förändring är kandidaters perspektiv av digitala steg i rekryteringsprocessen ett begränsat forskningsområde. Kandidatupplevelsen ska vårdas under rekryteringsprocessens förlopp i syfte att behålla ett gott företagsrykte på marknaden. Däremot är en upplevelse något som kan variera från individ till individ vilket kan tas i beaktande vid val av olika digitala rekryteringsmetoder. Denna studies syfte kan bidra till forskning och företag genom att beskriva vad som är en bra respektive sämre kandidatupplevelse av de olika stegen som tillämpas i den digitala rekryteringsprocessen. Syfte: Att beskriva kandidaters upplevelse av en digital rekryteringsprocess.  Metod: Studien har induktiv forskningsansats med viss deduktivism då syfte är baserat på förkunskap. För att beskriva kandidaters upplevelse har en kvantitativ forskningsmetod med tvärsnittdesign genomförts med en enkätundersökning bestående av 111 respondenter. För att nå en beskrivning ligger statistisk empiri i grund för att se variationer och samband i kandidaters upplevelser. Genomgående har studien ett tolkande och konstruktionistiskt förhållningsätt då upplevelser är av social konstruktion, därtill har empiri tolkats med en kvalitativ teoretisk förankring i forskningsområdet.  Slutsats: Empiriskt resultat visar på att kandidater har övergripande bra upplevelser av en digital rekryteringsprocess, däremot förekommer det variationer i värdering av upplevelse beroende av vilken urvalsmetod som tillämpas. Tillsammans med kvalitativ teoretisk tolkning kan slutsats dras att huruvida upplevelse är av bra eller sämre karaktär, är beroende av kandidatens erfarenhet av teknologi, kandidatens egen upplevelse av en rättvis bedömning samt kvalitén på digital kommunikation från rekryterare. / Background: The Swedish industry is influenced by digitalization which is seen among companies who have transformed their processes to digitalized. Within the field of Human Resources, it is acknowledged that the recruitment process is becoming more digitalized. This has given companies advantages in terms of cost and time efficiency. The job candidates’ perspective in this digital change is not a broadly explored research subject. For companies it is important to stimulate the candidate experience to keep a good reputation on the job market. Although, an experience can be valuated differently depending on the individual. This study could therefore contribute to research in the area and give practical implications for companies, with a description of a good and less good experience of digital elements in the recruitment process.  Purpose: To describe candidates’ experiences of a digital recruitment process  Method: The study has an inductive approach with a certain deductivism, based on prior knowledge in the research field. A cross-sectional study of quantitative nature was realized through a survey consisting of 111 respondents. The survey contributed with empirical statistics of variations and relationships between candidates’ experiences. The study applies an interpretative approach towards individual experiences. Therefore, is empirical statistics interpretated with a qualitative literature research in the area.  Conclusion: The empirical results showed that candidates’ share an overall good experience of a digital recruitments process but variations in individual experiences were identified depending on selection and assessment methods. The conclusion of the empirical results and qualitative interpretation of the results is that candidates have an overall good experience of a digital recruitment process and how the candidates´ valuates his or her experience can be dependent on technological knowledge, perceived fairness and quality of digital communication.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This thesis combines human and machine intelligence for consensus decision-making, and it contains four interrelated research areas. Before presenting the four research areas, this thesis presents a literature review on decision-making using two criteria: trust and risk. The analysis involves studying the individual and the multi-stakeholder decision-making. Also, it explores the relationship between trust and risk to provide insight on how to apply them when making any decision. This thesis presents a grouping procedure of the existing trust-based multi-stakeholder decision-making schemes by considering the group decision-making process and models. In the first research area, this thesis presents the foundation of building multi-stakeholder consensus decision-making (MSCDM). This thesis describes trust-based multi-stakeholder decision-making for water allocation to help the participants select a solution that comes from the best model. Several criteria are involved when deciding on a solution such as trust, damage, and benefit. This thesis considers Jain's fairness index as an indicator of reaching balance or equality for the stakeholder's needs. The preferred scenario is when having a high trust, low damages and high benefits. The worst scenario involves having low trust, high damage, and low benefit. The model is dynamic by adapting to the changes over time. The decision to select is the solution that is fair for almost everyone. In the second research area, this thesis presents a MSCDM, which is a generic framework that coordinates the decision-making rounds among stakeholders based on their influence toward each other, as represented by the trust relationship among them. This thesis describes the MSCDM framework that helps to find a decision the stakeholders can agree upon. Reaching a consensus decision might require several rounds where stakeholders negotiate by rating each other. This thesis presents the results of implementing MSCDM and evaluates the effect of trust on the consensus achievement and the reduction in the number of rounds needed to reach the final decision. This thesis presents Rating Convergence in the implemented MSCDM framework, and such convergence is a result of changes in the stakeholders' rating behavior in each round. This thesis evaluates the effect of trust on the rating changes by measuring the distance of the choices made by the stakeholders. Trust is useful in decreasing the distances. In the third research area, this thesis presents Rating Convergence in the implemented MSCDM framework, and such convergence is a result of changes in stakeholders' rating behavior in each round. This thesis evaluates the effect of trust on the rating changes by measuring the perturbation in the rating matrix. Trust is useful in increasing the rating matrix perturbation. Such perturbation helps to decrease the number of rounds. Therefore, trust helps to increase the speed of agreeing upon the same decision through the influence. In the fourth research area, this thesis presents Rating Aggregation operators in the implemented MSCDM framework. This thesis addresses the need for aggregating the stakeholders' ratings while they negotiate on the round of decisions to compute the consensus achievement. This thesis presents four aggregation operators: weighted sum (WS), weighted product (WP), weighted product similarity measure (WPSM), and weighted exponent similarity measure (WESM). This thesis studies the performance of those aggregation operators in terms of consensus achievement and the number of rounds needed. The consensus threshold controls the performance of these operators. The contribution of this thesis lays the foundation for developing a framework for MSCDM that facilitates reaching the consensus decision by accounting for the stakeholders' influences toward one another. Trust represents the influence.

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Over the past decade, the use of asynchronous video interviews (AVIs) has increased exponentially, largely spurred by ongoing technological progress and shifts to remote work. Although prior research shows interview design can influence applicant reactions, the effect of video interview design factors on interviewee reactions remains unclear. The present study determines the influence of AVI stimulus format (text-based vs. audio-visual questions) on applicant perceptions of social presence, fairness and organisational attractiveness. To this end, a between-subjects posttest-only experimental design was used in two separate samples (South African sample, N = 58; USA sample, N = 169, Combined samples, N = 227). Participants were randomly assigned to either the control or experimental group. Participants completed a mock interview on a commercially available AVI platform and then answered a questionnaire measuring perceptions of social presence, fairness, and organisational attractiveness. Bootstrapped independent sample t-tests and serial mediation were used to test the hypotheses. Within Sample 1, applicant perceptions of social presence, fairness and organisational attractiveness were higher for the audio-visual and text-based AVIs, thereby supporting the proposition that audio-visual stimuli lead to higher perceptions of social presence, fairness and organisational attractiveness. Conversely, Sample 2's findings were non-significant (p > .05). While there were mixed results, the findings of this study provide preliminary evidence which suggests that within the South African context, audio-visual stimuli can be used in AVIs. Organisations in the American context should pay close attention to the effects of AVI stimulus format on applicant reactions as the findings from the American sample were not conclusive. Future research should investigate applicant reactions to different forms of AVI stimulus during a multi-stage selection process

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<p>Temporal point processes (TPP) are mathematical approaches for modeling asynchronous event sequences by considering the temporal dependency of each event on past events and its instantaneous rate. Temporal point processes can model various problems, from earthquake aftershocks, trade orders, gang violence, and reported crime patterns, to network analysis, infectious disease transmissions, and virus spread forecasting. In each of these cases, the entity's behavior with the corresponding information is noted over time as an asynchronous event sequence, and the analysis is done using temporal point processes, which provides a means to define the generative mechanism of the sequence of events and ultimately predict events and investigate causality.</p> <p><br></p> <p>Among point processes, Hawkes process as a stochastic point process is able to model a wide range of contagious and self-exciting patterns. One of Hawkes process's well-known applications is predicting the evolution of viral processes on networks, which is an important problem in biology, the social sciences, and the study of the Internet. In existing works, mean-field analysis based upon degree distribution is used to predict viral spreading across networks of different types. However, it has been shown that degree distribution alone fails to predict the behavior of viruses on some real-world networks. Recent attempts have been made to use assortativity to address this shortcoming. This thesis illustrates how the evolution of such a viral process is sensitive to the underlying network's structure. </p> <p><br></p> <p>In Chapter 3, we show that adding assortativity does not fully explain the variance in the spread of viruses for a number of real-world networks. We propose using the graphlet frequency distribution combined with assortativity to explain variations in the evolution of viral processes across networks with identical degree distribution. Using a data-driven approach, by coupling predictive modeling with viral process simulation on real-world networks, we show that simple regression models based on graphlet frequency distribution can explain over 95\% of the variance in virality on networks with the same degree distribution but different network topologies. Our results highlight the importance of graphlets and identify a small collection of graphlets that may have the most significant influence over the viral processes on a network.</p> <p><br></p> <p>Due to the flexibility and expressiveness of deep learning techniques, several neural network-based approaches have recently shown promise for modeling point process intensities. However, there is a lack of research on the possible adversarial attacks and the robustness of such models regarding adversarial attacks and natural shocks to systems. Furthermore, while neural point processes may outperform simpler parametric models on in-sample tests, how these models perform when encountering adversarial examples or sharp non-stationary trends remains unknown. </p> <p><br></p> <p>In Chapter 4, we propose several white-box and black-box adversarial attacks against deep temporal point processes. Additionally, we investigate the transferability of white-box adversarial attacks against point processes modeled by deep neural networks, which are considered a more elevated risk. Extensive experiments confirm that neural point processes are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Such a vulnerability is illustrated both in terms of predictive metrics and the effect of attacks on the underlying point process's parameters. Expressly, adversarial attacks successfully transform the temporal Hawkes process regime from sub-critical to into a super-critical and manipulate the modeled parameters that is considered a risk against parametric modeling approaches. Additionally, we evaluate the vulnerability and performance of these models in the presence of non-stationary abrupt changes, using the crimes and Covid-19 pandemic dataset as an example.</p> <p><br></p> <p> Considering the security vulnerability of deep-learning models, including deep temporal point processes, to adversarial attacks, it is essential to ensure the robustness of the deployed algorithms that is despite the success of deep learning techniques in modeling temporal point processes.</p> <p> </p> <p>In Chapter 5, we study the robustness of deep temporal point processes against several proposed adversarial attacks from the adversarial defense viewpoint. Specifically, we investigate the effectiveness of adversarial training using universal adversarial samples in improving the robustness of the deep point processes. Additionally, we propose a general point process domain-adopted (GPDA) regularization, which is strictly applicable to temporal point processes, to reduce the effect of adversarial attacks and acquire an empirically robust model. In this approach, unlike other computationally expensive approaches, there is no need for additional back-propagation in the training step, and no further network is required. Ultimately, we propose an adversarial detection framework that has been trained in the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) manner and solely on clean training data. </p> <p><br></p> <p>Finally, in Chapter 6, we discuss implications of the research and future research directions.</p>

The research question that moves the present work is whether and how competition law shall play a role in making our society more ‘sustainable’, intending this term in a broad meaning, and therefore linked to social, economic and environmental sustainability. The question raises from the awareness of the problems that are affecting our society, also if we refer at its democratic foundations. In particular, we considered that issues such as increasing income inequalities, raising market concentration rates and the even faster climate changes are topics that cannot be outside the academic analysis of the various policies. Therefore, if we try to answer at the question if competition law shall play a role in this context, the analysis should start from the very foundations of this discipline. At this purpose, in our research, we scrutinised how the most representative competition law regimes in the world - i.e., the US antitrust law and the EU competition law systems – developed during their history. This analysis is conducted by reading through legislative sources, policy statements, judicial decisions and scholar works. What emerges is that competition law shall not only be focused on mere economic and econometric objectives, such economic efficiency, but it was intended more as a structural instrument, created for preventing the concentration of an excessive degree of economic power on the same subject or on a bounce of entities. Therefore, after having affirmed this structuralist aim of competition law, it is possible to understand how every other objective shall be considered as a by-product of a healthy competitive process, and not as an end of competition law in itself. This is particularly clear in the European context, as competition law ought not to be intended as a separate or lone subject, but as a field of law well rooted into the EU and its Member States’ constitutional traditions. After having established that competition law shall play a role in the transition towards a more sustainable society, the focus moves on how this task shall be performed. For this purpose, the present research scrutinised the issues we mentioned before, by making a comparative analysis between the EU and the U.S. competition law and antitrust models and, inside the EU environment, among the various solutions adopted in the Member States. This analysis first needed to be carried out by means of an empirical assessment of the issue at stake, especially from an economic standpoint. Then, the legal tools needed in order to reach the desired outcomes were scrutinised, first by making reference to the solutions already adopted by enforcers and Courts on the basis of the existing rules, and, subsequently, new tools are analysed and proposed. In particular, the research establishes a connection between income inequalities and the increasing rates of market concentration. The latter dynamic was deemed particularly intense in the digital market context, which are characterised by market dynamics which escape from the common understanding of competition, as they lead the market to tip in favour of a firm, usually the first mover. In a nutshell, they are characterised by a sort of winner takes all structure. This field represents the core of this research, as it is where excessive market concentration shows most its detrimental effects and the need to a structuralist approach to competition law appears much needed. Therefore, this work aims to provide its contribution to the very active academic debate on this field. However, this research does not want to be limited to the digital market problem but is directed at casting lights on the need for a multi-value approach to competition law at 360 degrees, which can turn into a multi-tool enforcement to better tailor the application of competition rules to all the analysed issues, which are however interrelated thanks to the broad concept of ‘sustainability’ outlined above, in line with the Brundtland Report on sustainability issued in 1987 by the World Commission on Environment and Development. What emerges is that competition law ought to play a role in the transition towards a more sustainable economy and society. This depends on policy choices, and this work is aimed – in the realm of the current scholar debate on this topic – at providing its constructive contribution. However, what is important to affirm is that policy choices directed at establishing the multi-value and multi-tool competition law described above are not only based on progressive or hipster academic ideas, but they are deeply rooted into our societies’ constitutional traditions, and, in the end, in a healthy conception of the liberal economy itself.