A New Model for Oversight of Commercial Activities by Nonprofits?

This Note discusses a New Jersey tax case, Fields v. Trustees of Princeton University, that settled in 2016 after motion practice. The plaintiffs were twenty-eight municipal taxpayers in Princeton who challenged Princeton University’s entire property-tax exemption on the ground that the way the University distributed royalty payments from patents to faculty inventors and licensed these patents in joint ventures and other partnerships ran afoul of the “profit test” that applies to educational property-tax exemptions in New Jersey. This Note uses this litigation to discuss a potential conflict between the Bayh-Dole Act, which encourages academic patent development, and such profit tests on charitable and educational property exemptions in several states. It concludes that while the model of litigation in Fields could offer a new procedural oversight means over nonprofits, a better solution involves substantive legislative reform that regularizes current ad hoc payments between municipalities and large nonprofits and better aligns local property taxes with federal policy

MobilityMirror: Bias-Adjusted Transportation Datasets

We describe customized synthetic datasets for publishing mobility data. Private companies are providing new transportation modalities, and their data is of high value for integrative transportation research, policy enforcement, and public accountability. However, these companies are disincentivized from sharing data not only to protect the privacy of individuals (drivers and/or passengers), but also to protect their own competitive advantage. Moreover, demographic biases arising from how the services are delivered may be amplified if released data is used in other contexts. We describe a model and algorithm for releasing origin-destination histograms that removes selected biases in the data using causality-based methods. We compute the origin-destination histogram of the original dataset then adjust the counts to remove undesirable causal relationships that can lead to discrimination or violate contractual obligations with data owners. We evaluate the utility of the algorithm on real data from a dockless bike share program in Seattle and taxi data in New York, and show that these adjusted transportation datasets can retain utility while removing bias in the underlying data.Comment: Presented at BIDU 2018 workshop and published in Springer Communications in Computer and Information Science vol 92

Algorithmic Fairness in Business Analytics: Directions for Research and Practice

The extensive adoption of business analytics (BA) has brought financial gains and increased efficiencies. However, these advances have simultaneously drawn attention to rising legal and ethical challenges when BA inform decisions with fairness implications. As a response to these concerns, the emerging study of algorithmic fairness deals with algorithmic outputs that may result in disparate outcomes or other forms of injustices for subgroups of the population, especially those who have been historically marginalized. Fairness is relevant on the basis of legal compliance, social responsibility, and utility; if not adequately and systematically addressed, unfair BA systems may lead to societal harms and may also threaten an organization's own survival, its competitiveness, and overall performance. This paper offers a forward-looking, BA-focused review of algorithmic fairness. We first review the state-of-the-art research on sources and measures of bias, as well as bias mitigation algorithms. We then provide a detailed discussion of the utility-fairness relationship, emphasizing that the frequent assumption of a trade-off between these two constructs is often mistaken or short-sighted. Finally, we chart a path forward by identifying opportunities for business scholars to address impactful, open challenges that are key to the effective and responsible deployment of BA

How Leadership Occurs in a Loosely Coupled, Multi-Stakeholder System

As the world continues to evolve towards more collaboration and cooperation among stakeholders, challenging established hierarchies and systems, leadership is called upon and questioned. The purpose of this research was to understand the leadership phenomena in a loosely coupled, multi-stakeholder system. The researcher employed qualitative methods using grounded theory and gathered data through a series of in-depth interviews, ethnographic observations, personal leadership experiences and reflections, focus groups, and theoretical sampling. Constant comparative analysis produced four major categories of leadership phenomenon: the why, the what, the how, and the who. Grounded in the experience of research participants, the developed theory explains that acts of leadership happen at the system level, the core group level, the coalition of the willing level, and the founding members level (the “we”). A small group of people (the “who”) utilize the processes of influence (the “how”), self accountability (the “what”), and moral responsibility (the “why”) to carry out the purpose of the system and maintain the values of collaboration. The loosely coupled, multi-stakeholder system acts as a living organism that interacts with the external environment and internal resources to accomplish its purpose. The four dimensions of the system (the why, the what, the how, and the who) interplay and interact with each other in a dynamic, cyclical fashion where four levels of leadership are enacted by individual actors: taking responsibility, inviting to collaborate, forming and sustaining the “leadership” team, and balancing chaos and order

The Nagoya Protocol and the Legal Structure of Global Biogenomic Research

As life sciences technologies have advanced, so too has the potential for these international collaborations to lead to breakthrough medicines, enhance food security, and protect ecological systems. The linchpin of this progress is the development of high throughput genetic sequencing technologies. Researchers are now able to generate and compare large stretches of DNA - 1 million bases or more - from different sources quickly and inexpensively. Such comparisons can yield massive amounts of information about the role of inheritance in susceptibility to infection and illness as well as responses to environmental influences. In addition, the ability to sequence genomes more quickly and inexpensively creates enormous potential for new diagnostics and therapies. This is true not only for sequencing the human genome, but also for sequencing the genomes of simple and complex organisms that comprise the entire human environment. This Article will first provide examples of where international collaborations have led to advances in medical and agricultural benefits for populations in both rich and poor countries. It will then describe how new life sciences research collaborations, primarily using genetic sequencing technology, may detect potential human pathogens, characterize microbial life, and catalogue the unique genetic information in all wildlife species. It will situate these biogenomic projects in the context of the international access and benefit sharing law, derived from several sources, but most importantly the 1993 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Finally, this Article will analyze four of these new international collaborations to demonstrate that the common tensions that arise between generating scientific and other benefits through exploiting new research possibilities, and meeting the food and medical needs of the world\u27s population today are often reconcilable. Part I of this Article outlines the law and ethics of life sciences research partnerships as they unfolded over the course of the twentieth century. Part II analyzes how advances in genetic sequencing technology may accelerate the pace and impact of new life sciences research collaborations. Part II also examines the development of international law over the course of those technological advances, and how the law now requires or shapes partnerships to benefit all participants and to be mindful of constituencies who may or may not benefit. Part III examines four major collaborations, using these case studies to show how the international law of biodiversity is shaping their objectives and channeling their benefits and also addressing persistent ethical questions about the use and distribution of scarce resources. Part IV sets out the conclusions