Minding the Gaps: Fairness, Welfare, and the Constitutive Structure of Distributive Assessment

Despite over a century’s disputation and attendant opportunity for clarification, the field of inquiry now loosely labeled “welfare economics” (WE) remains surprisingly prone to foundational confusions. The same holds of work done by many practitioners of WE’s influential offshoot, normative “law and economics” (LE). A conspicuous contemporary case of confusion turns up in recent discussion concerning “fairness versus welfare.” The very naming of this putative dispute signals a crude category error. “Welfare” denotes a proposed object of distribution. “Fairness” describes and appropriate pattern of distribution. Welfare itself is distributed fairly or unfairly. “Fairness versus welfare” is analytically on all fours with locutions of the form “warmth versus clothing” or “35 mph versus tennis balls.” Framing disputes in this way leads us nowhere. It only miscarries our thinking. A more venerable source of perplexity is found in the hallowed Pareto criterion (PC) and its conceptual kin. One proffered advantage of the PC is its purportedly enabling “us” to sidestep contested questions of interpersonal comparison, aggregation and distribution. But what manner of collective agent – what “we” – might plausibly be expected to take interest in unavoidably resource-distributive prescriptions, without view to the propriety with which these treat each member of the collectivity effectively addressed by the prescriptions, is left unidentified. And as soon as we plausibly fill-in the gap, the PC and kin prove prescriptively sterile. We get nowhere until we confront distributions – and de facto distributors – head-on. This Mongraph seeks to lay out with some care both when, and how, such confronting should be done. It specifies both the conditions, and the appropriately structured mode of analysis, under which distributive-ethical assessment is called for and apt to bear fruit. The means to success lie in carefully mapping the constitutive structure – the full valence grammar – of distribution-implicative claims. Effectively normative claims concerning distributions wrought by legal rules, programs or policies, if they would be so much as cognitively complete let alone ethically assessable, must assign values to all variables opened by the case grammar of “to distribute” and cognate infinitives – “to allocate,” “to apportion,” “to mete out,” etc. They must, that is, determinately and inter-compatibly indicate to whom claims are in effect being addressed, what is effectively being distributed, pursuant to what pattern the latter is being distributed, by what means and to whom. To be normatively defensible, in turn, such claims must not only carefully specify, but also must ethically justify, the jointly compatible values they proffer for filling those variables. The normative payoff of the mode of analysis proposed here is a compelling distributive ethic, a means of rendering past and present foundational disputes both tractable and conclusively resoluble, and in the end a new research agenda for what the Article labels an “ethically intelligible law and economics.

New Fundamental Technologies in Data Mining

The progress of data mining technology and large public popularity establish a need for a comprehensive text on the subject. The series of books entitled by "Data Mining" address the need by presenting in-depth description of novel mining algorithms and many useful applications. In addition to understanding each section deeply, the two books present useful hints and strategies to solving problems in the following chapters. The contributing authors have highlighted many future research directions that will foster multi-disciplinary collaborations and hence will lead to significant development in the field of data mining

Applications of Contemporary Management Approaches in Supply Chains

In today's rapidly changing business environment, strong influence of globalization and information technologies drives practitioners and researchers of modern supply chain management, who are interested in applying different contemporary management paradigms and approaches, to supply chain process. This book intends to provide a guide to researchers, graduate students and practitioners by incorporating every aspect of management paradigms into overall supply chain functions such as procurement, warehousing, manufacturing, transportation and disposal. More specifically, this book aims to present recent approaches and ideas including experiences and applications in the field of supply chains, which may give a reference point and useful information for new research and to those allied, affiliated with and peripheral to the field of supply chains and its management

Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design – FMCAD 2022

The Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design (FMCAD) is an annual conference on the theory and applications of formal methods in hardware and system verification. FMCAD provides a leading forum to researchers in academia and industry for presenting and discussing groundbreaking methods, technologies, theoretical results, and tools for reasoning formally about computing systems. FMCAD covers formal aspects of computer-aided system design including verification, specification, synthesis, and testing

Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design – FMCAD 2022

The Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design (FMCAD) is an annual conference on the theory and applications of formal methods in hardware and system verification. FMCAD provides a leading forum to researchers in academia and industry for presenting and discussing groundbreaking methods, technologies, theoretical results, and tools for reasoning formally about computing systems. FMCAD covers formal aspects of computer-aided system design including verification, specification, synthesis, and testing

Integration of operational research and environmental management

The subject of this thesis is the integration of Operational Research and Environmental Management. Both sciences play an important role in the research of environmental issues. Part I describes a framework for the interactions between Operational Research and Environmental Management. The framework describes three levels of incorporating environmental issues in economic decision making: waste management, recovery management and preventive management, as well as three types of policy approaches towards environmental problems: local orientation, regional orientation and global orientation. This classification helps to find possibilities of including environmental issues in existing Operational Research models and methods and to find possibilities to use Operational Research models and methods in solving environmental problems. Part II contains three examples of dealing with environmental issues in Operational Research models: waste disposal in a location model, manure utilization in a farm management model and an environmental extension of a blending model. Part III contains two examples of using Operational Research models and methods in environmental management: a linear programming model for the mineral excess problem in the Netherlands and a network flow model for paper recycling in Europe. The final chapter confronts the general ideas from the framework with the knowledge obtained from Part II and III

The Economics of Biodiversity The Dasgupta Review Full Report

In 2019, Her Majesty’s Treasury (UK) commissioned Sir Partha Dasgupta, an economist and Professor Emeritus at Cambridge University to produce an independent, global review on the Economics of Biodiversity. Sir Partha was assisted by a multi-disciplinary Advisory Panel that included representatives of public policy, science, economics and business. The Review argues that countries should de-emphasize GDP as an index of progress and instead should focus on a national Wealth measure that includes an accounting for Natural Capital. After World War II, when the world was very different from what it is now, Sir Partha argues the economic questions being faced could be studied most productively by excluding Natural Capital and focusing on Produced Capital (e.g. infrastructure) and Human Capital. But today, as economists have begun to devise methods to value and to track Natural Capital, it is becoming apparent that while Produced and Human Capital may be increasing, Natural Capital is declining. The Review analyzes what we know about Natural capital and begins to address how Natural Capital might be incorporated into a valid assessment of national wealth and long-term sustainability