This study examined fairness in the online society of World of Warcraft(WoW), a society under constraint by game developers but dynamically affected by users. Because the society is voluntary, people have the ability to both effect major change on, and leave, that society at any time. Thus, fairness in this virtual world is an important area for anthropological research. In-game fairness pointed to the organization, distribution, and acquisition of wealth. In particular, I examined player perceptions of real-money trading (RMT) in the context of individual and collective motivations in the endgame. In addition, I considered loot distribution systems as a mode of promoting player-initiated definitions of fairness. I discovered an overall economy of fun in which players act to maximize fun for the majority. Real-money trading was justified by casual players because players require progression as individuals in order to better serve the fun of the collective.

Price discrimination has been widely discussed in economics. Scholars have discussed perceived fairness in the direct exchange perspective, sellers and buyers. However, there are few studies related price discrimination and its impact on consumers¡¦ psychology. Therefore, this paper examines the influence of price discrimination on consumers¡¦ perceived unfairness and their purchase intention as well as the effect of discount depth and discount framing in consumer¡¦s perspective. Results obtained from 402 questionnaires collected in Taiwan indicate that (1) price discrimination has influence on consumers¡¦ perceived (un)fairness; (2) discount depths moderate the impact of price discrimination on consumers¡¦ perception of unfairness; (3) advantaged inequality has influence on consumers¡¦ purchase intention; (4) discount framing doesn¡¦t have influence on either consumers¡¦ perceived unfairness or their purchase intention.

In this paper I argue that Liam Murphy’s collective consequentialism—emphasizing fairness instead of maximization of value—is not an adequate response to the demandingness objections levied at consequentialism. Especially since Peter Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” many have objected that consequentialism is far too demanding, particularly concerning our obligations of assistance to those in extreme poverty. Murphy thinks that the problem is not that consequentialism is necessarily too demanding; it is that, in our nonideal world of partial compliance, consequentialism is too demanding on those who comply with its dictates. I hope to show that Murphy’s theory is unsatisfying. I will not defend any particular version of consequentialism over alternative consequentialist theories, nor will I defend consequentialism over alternative non-consequentialist moral theories. My aim is far narrower: To show that those who accept a broadly consequentialist account of morality have little reason to accept Murphy’s collective consequentialism.

This thesis started with one question: “how could we make the legal system more fair for more people?” One possible answer is given to that question in the four chapters that follow: we can achieve a more fair and efficient legal system by providing our citizens with a basic level of legal literacy. That basic education includes a general knowledge of the structure and foundation of law, its content and purpose and finally the role of the people within political systems supporting different kinds of legal theories. I have argued that such education will increase people’s interest about legal matters while encouraging them to take a more active role with regards to legal matters. Often emphasized in this thesis is the role of interpretation within law. I’ve argued that the central role of interpretation in law could serve as an advantage for the citizens given that they sport the belief that they could bring out positive changes within their society and provided that they become motivated to take action based on that belief. The first step in achieving such changes is increasing legal literacy, an intricate part of which would be to show ordinary citizens the many subtlties that exist at different levels of law. People’s awareness of such subtleties accompanied with further institutional changes which would allow them to seek legal advice at an affordable rate and in different ways – as suggested in chapter four of this thesis - should help prevent many legal troubles from arising in the first place, thereby leading to a more fair and efficient legal state: one in which less injustice is seen and more resources are spent on issues that cannot be helped.

In this paper, we propose a novel information-theoretical fairness metric to evaluate the fairness of bandwidth allocation to distributed nodes in local area network. When the source traffic pattern is fixed, the proposed metric is a mapping from the set of all medium access control (MAC) protocols to the interval [0,1] in the real line such that a larger value corresponds to a MAC protocol that allocates bandwidth more fairly. The metric is applicable for a wide range of medium access control schemes including those in which the packet lengths are not identical and/or multipacket reception (MPR) capability is available. To verify the correctness of the novel metric, we use it to evaluate the fairness levels of an IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN composed of homogeneous or heterogeneous nodes. Our simulations indicate that for the IEEE 802.11 protocol, the short-term fairness level is low while the long-term fairness level is high. The information-theoretical fairness metric leads to a conclusion that is consistent to the previous finding in the lecture.

The purpose of this study is to test the effect of the GETP on the Promotion of Civil Servants. The methodology of this study is to design the questionnaire and interview survey by SPSS as a tool with quantitative analysis of descriptive statistics, t-test, one-way ANOVA, reliability analysis, factor analysis, and regression analysis. Demographic factor as moderator is also to examine the perception of GETP and job satisfaction to predict the effect of GETP on the Promotion of Civil Servants. The result of this research shows that there is no empirical evidence to support the statistical significance relationship between GEPT and the Promotion of Civil Servants. However, the research finding concludes that the higher the perception of GEPT level is, the more the fairness of the Promotion of Civil Servants is. Thus, this is not difficult to understand that the positive correlation existence on the high advancedment fairness with the high job satisfaction. In other words, there is no statistical significance relationship among the Civil Servants perception, fairness, job neglect, and job satisfaction.

TCP is the most popular transport layer protocol. When there is congestion in the network, either sender¡¦s TCP or router¡¦s buffer management has its way to resist the penalties of congestion. But each of them achieves this goal in an independent way. In TCP, Tahoe, Reno, New Reno, SACK, Vegas, FACK, and some modifications to TCP to improve performance were proposed. Although they have better performance than previous TCP, the cooperation between different types of TCP is not well. And TCP-unfriendly connections will be adverse to TCP connections. In buffer management, the fairness between different connections can be maintained. But some phenomena will be adverse to TCP connection because of buffer management is TCP-unawareness. In this paper, we show a problem that buffer management scheme may be unfriendly to new connection which is going to join the network with congestion. This problem will incur (1) TCP-unfriendly behavior, (2) alleviating congestion inefficiently, (3) unfairness between two connections. We propose a scheme to alleviate this problem and this scheme is easy to implement with existing buffer management scheme.

Fairness theory represents a widely cited framework for modeling the cognitive processes that underlie the formation of fairness perceptions in the workplace. Nonetheless, imprecise language and scant empirical research limit its ability to further organizational justice research. Therefore, in this dissertation I provide a review and critique of fairness theory suggesting several revisions. I then build upon this revised model to develop a new model of fairness perception formation. The developed model is tested via a laboratory experiment and a field study, both of which provide initial evidence in favor of the proposed model.

In this dissertation, I explore the systematic failure of the current state of the art statistical techniques to detect gender salary inequity in a special case to propose a more appropriate quantitative method for analyzing gender salary discrimination. This research contributes in three key areas for the development of the quantitative analysis of salary inequity detection. I uncovered salary inequities within gender groups that can mask the salary discrimination between these groups. I then proposed the Two-stage Classification Regression as an appropriate novel statistical method. Finally, the additional propositions made can enhance future salary inequity research.Regardless of the outcome of any gender salary inequity study, we can often find a subgroup of females that is discriminated against when compared to the rest of females. Likewise, a subgroup of males may also be victim of salary inequity when compared to other males. In this context, the first main discovery is that the existence of salary inequities within gender groups can prevent regular statistical techniques from detecting salary inequity between males and females. Detecting this form of salary inequity will increase the sensitivity of the statistical test and hedge its potentially higher risk to the institution.Facing such a statistical problem, the second main contribution was devising a novel statistical approach that can not only succeed where other techniques systematically fail, but also provide a new framework for a more informative statistical analysis. In addition, a more comprehensive definition of salary inequity that goes beyond the simple measure of gender salary gap was derived.The third significant contribution is a set of propositions aiming at framing the agenda for future research on salary inequity studies. A statistical test was proposed to determine when the outcomes of these the linear regression and reverse regression techniques can be expected to be the same. Also, the probability model which is not estimable, but the most robust model was shown to be equivalent to the logistic regression model which is easily estimable, but somewhat difficult to interpret. The goal is to create theoretical supports for better statistical and econometric analyses.

This dissertation consists of three essays in experimental economics. The essays investigate different aspects of reputation in fairness games in a controlled laboratory environment. It has been established in the literature of economics, sociology, and psychology that social norms together with other-regarding preferences often govern subjects' decisions in addition to strategic considerations. The dissertation examines the incentives connected with the existence of social norms that could cause deviations from standard economic model predictions. I use experiments so that I can tightly control the environment and provide rigorous tests of existing theories, stylized facts, and anecdotal evidence on the importance of reputation in economic interactions. The first essay presents findings that reputation triggers indirectly reciprocal behavior of subjects. However, reputation might only be signaling what is considered as socially appropriate behavior. This hypothesis and the results of the first essay led me to develop a set of experiments in the second essay to contrast pure reputation effects with the social influence of reputation. The third part of the dissertation, co-authored with Ninghua Du, examines reputation and efficiency wages in a labor market setting by analyzing the effects of negative technological shocks on long run relationships between firms and workers.