9,074 research outputs found

    Incorporating Fairness into Development of an Integrated Multi-agent Online Dispute Resolution Environment

    Get PDF
    The paper describes the development of an integrated multi-agent online dispute resolution environment called IMODRE that was designed to assist parties involved in Australian family law disputes achieve legally fairer negotiated outcomes. The system extends our previouswork in developing negotiation support systems Family_ Winner and AssetDivider. In this environment one agent uses a Bayesian Belief Network expertly modeled with knowledge of the Australian Family Law domain to advise disputants of their Best Alternatives to Negotiated Agreements. Another agent incorporates the percentage split of marital property into an integrative bargaining process and applies heuristics and game theory to equitably distribute marital property assets and facilitate further trade-offs. We use this system to add greater fairness to Family property law negotiations

    The Sponge Cake Dilemma over the Nile: Achieving Fairness in Resource Allocation through Rawlsian Theory and Algorithms

    Full text link
    This article examines water disputes through an integrated framework combining normative and positive perspectives. John Rawls' theory of justice provides moral guidance, upholding rights to reasonable access for all riparian states. However, positive analysis using cake-cutting models reveals real-world strategic constraints. While Rawls defines desired ends, cake-cutting offers algorithmic means grounded in actual behaviors. The Nile River basin dispute illustrates this synthesis. Rawls suggests inherent rights to water, but unrestricted competition could enable monopoly. His principles alone cannot prevent unfavorable outcomes, given limitations like self-interest. This is where cake-cutting provides value despite biased claims. Its models identify arrangements aligning with Rawlsian fairness while incorporating strategic considerations. The article details the cake-cutting theory, reviews water conflicts literature, examines the Nile case, explores cooperative vs. non-cooperative games, and showcases algorithmic solutions. The integrated framework assesses pathways for implementing Rawlsian ideals given real-world dynamics. This novel synthesis of normative and positive lenses enriches the study of water disputes and resource allocation more broadly.Comment: 31 pages, 7 Figure

    Rights at Work: Fairness in Personal Work Relations and Restorative Labour Market Regulation

    Get PDF
    By desire or necessity, virtually all of us work for a considerable portion of our lives. Work defines our social status, determines our degrees of health and happiness and underpins our sense of self. The productivity, efficiency and economic significance of the work we do, in aggregate terms, are critical to the prosperity of the societies in which we live. Moreover, fair treatment in our workplaces is an important aspect of our individual well-being and a mark of the civility and decency of our communities. Many of us expect the law to ensure fairness in our work relations; but increasingly, legal arrangements governing labour market regulation are not up to the task. In developed economies, legal rules dealing with rights at work vary dramatically in terms of their institutional context, substantive content and breadth of applicability across varying forms of productive or remunerated personal activity. However, a widespread current concern in many jurisdictions, including Canada, is that “rights at work” often hinge upon a worker’s status as an “employee” in a “standard employment contract” and do not inure to the benefit of those personally performing work for others in a broad range of other legal arrangements, and who are thus left vulnerable to exploitation. In the globalized new economy, legal regulation to support or ensure fairness through domestically legislated rights at work has become increasingly problematic. There has also developed a full blown scholarly crisis about the scope and content of labour and employment law, which has engulfed the global academy in the wake of the collapse of the post-war economic, political and social consensus over the welfare state. Finding ways around the apparent problems is not simple or easy – conceptually, economically, socially or politically. In part, this is because the values which underpin rights at work are contested terrain. But in large measure also, because this context requires a re-conceptualization of worker rights along the full gamut of personal work relations with a commensurate effort to understand how such thinking connects to broader labour market regulation. A myriad of legal structures regulate labour markets which are outside the confines of traditional labour and employment law as understood by most lawyers. That wider playing field is provides the background parameters for this paper. The paper’s purpose is to explore schematically ways to improve the fairness of the legal construction of personal work relations within an integrated, efficient and restorative approach to labour market regulation. Part I sets out the shifting contexts for reflection on rights at work as they have evolved in recent decades. It focuses on changing labour market realities, the collapse of the post-World War II welfare state, the abandonment of the intellectual consensus in which labour and employment law were imbedded, and the new normative tensions over rights at work in the globalized, post-modern economic, social and political environment. It highlights the prevalence of precarious employment, and its attendant devaluation of rights at work and benefits gained through work, as a potential precursor to significant political instability. Part II identifies ways of rethinking fair work relations and improved labour market regulation. It reviews advances in human capability development theory which provide a new normative framework for re-casting work relations and labour market regulation. It outlines the value of a relational understanding of rights in moving beyond the standard employment contract as the primary legal construct for the regulation of personal work relations. It then tackles principles of responsive or restorative regulation as procedural approaches for achieving integrated labour markets which enhance economic competitiveness while respecting fair work relations. Lastly, it contemplates possibilities for stability and social justice through greater rights at and through work, and for competitive but fair labour market regulation. If these ambitions are to be attained, it will involve harnessing both public and private means at national and international levels in the context of deliberative democracy

    On the integration of trust with negotiation, argumentation and semantics

    Get PDF
    Agreement Technologies are needed for autonomous agents to come to mutually acceptable agreements, typically on behalf of humans. These technologies include trust computing, negotiation, argumentation and semantic alignment. In this paper, we identify a number of open questions regarding the integration of computational models and tools for trust computing with negotiation, argumentation and semantic alignment. We consider these questions in general and in the context of applications in open, distributed settings such as the grid and cloud computing. © 2013 Cambridge University Press.This work was partially supported by the Agreement Technology COST action (IC0801). The authors would like to thank for helpful discussions and comments all participants in the panel on >Trust, Argumentation and Semantics> on 16 December 2009, Agia Napa, CyprusPeer Reviewe

    Future of Mediation: A Sociological Perspective, The

    Get PDF
    Arguably, these sociological pressures are central to the future direction of the mediation field and, in the aggregate, provide a useful building block in the development of an emerging sociology of mediation-a development that could fill the theory-to-practice gap which currently bedevils the mediation field. Understanding sociological forces reminds us of the constraints within which mediators, as social actors, must work. More importantly, an awareness of these pressures is, conceivably, essential to the development of an autonomous and discernible profession that remains capable of welcoming a diversity of practitioners and their respective approaches. I summarize each of these pressures below in five distinct sociological themes

    Designing Normative Theories for Ethical and Legal Reasoning: LogiKEy Framework, Methodology, and Tool Support

    Full text link
    A framework and methodology---termed LogiKEy---for the design and engineering of ethical reasoners, normative theories and deontic logics is presented. The overall motivation is the development of suitable means for the control and governance of intelligent autonomous systems. LogiKEy's unifying formal framework is based on semantical embeddings of deontic logics, logic combinations and ethico-legal domain theories in expressive classic higher-order logic (HOL). This meta-logical approach enables the provision of powerful tool support in LogiKEy: off-the-shelf theorem provers and model finders for HOL are assisting the LogiKEy designer of ethical intelligent agents to flexibly experiment with underlying logics and their combinations, with ethico-legal domain theories, and with concrete examples---all at the same time. Continuous improvements of these off-the-shelf provers, without further ado, leverage the reasoning performance in LogiKEy. Case studies, in which the LogiKEy framework and methodology has been applied and tested, give evidence that HOL's undecidability often does not hinder efficient experimentation.Comment: 50 pages; 10 figure

    The Potential for a Family Law Tribunal

    Get PDF
    This thesis considers the potential for tribunal adjudication in family law, particularly for custody and access cases. The central argument is that a paradigm shift away from adversarialism may enable experimentation with a holistic tribunal-based family law settlement system, at least for family law cases in which a best-interests-of-the-child determination is required. It is suggested that within a holistic tribunal settlement system, multi-disciplinary mediators and adjudicators could share decision-making responsibility, nurture tribunal expertise and develop transparent decision-making guidelines, while adjudication could be relegated to a secondary, inquisitorial component. New empirical research on mediation and adjudication processes in selected tribunals is reported, which I argue is relevant to the potential for an alternative institutional approach to family law dispute resolution. I conclude that there appears to be sufficient potential for a tribunal approach to family law dispute resolution to warrant further research
    corecore