Ethical consumerism and wage levels: Evidence from an experimental market

This paper contributes to the promotion of multidisciplinary research on ethical consumerism by providing experimental evidence on consumer's willingness to reward sellers by paying higher wages to their workers. We analyze repeated interactions occurring between workers, sellers, and consumers within the framework of an experimental market. By successfully performing a task, workers allow sellers to offer a good through a market. Sellers set the price of goods and decide the wages of workers. Consumers enter the market sequentially and decide whether to accept one of the offers or to leave the market. Our data show that, especially in the first periods of the experiment, some sellers opt to pay high wages to their workers. However, this behavior is not rewarded by consumers, whose purchasing choices are almost exclusively driven by self-interest. In our interpretation, the connection between workers and sellers that connotes our experimental design, with workers who allow sellers to enter the market, may induce consumers to believe that eventual sacrifices for paying high wages to workers must be entirely on sellers. Our result suggests that the more salient is made the importance of some stakeholders in allowing the firm's activity, the fewer consumers' may be willing to sacrifice their monetary payoff to improve these stakeholders' condition

Operations on Concavoconvex Type-2 Fuzzy Sets

Concavoconvex fuzzy set is the result of the com-bination of the concepts of convex and concave fuzzy sets. This paper investigates concavoconvex type-2 fuzzy sets. Basic operations, union, intersection and complement on concavoconvex type-2 fuzzy sets us-ing min and product t-norm and max t-conorm are studied and some of their algebraic properties are explored

MULTI-PARADIGMATIC DEVELOPMENT OF CONTEXT-AWARE APPLICATIONS

In this article we are to explore different roles that Context-Oriented Programming (COP), Layered-Base Context Aware Programming (LBCAP) and Run-Time Subject Oriented Programming (RTSOP) can play in developing context-aware applications. Since the process of developing a context aware application is a very complex procedure, we have tried to separate complexities regarding different aspects of context-aware programs and based on this separation, have investigated the roles of the paradigms

Virtuality as a basis for problem solving?

This paper is an attempt to develop a paradigm in problem solving where the notion of virtuality plays a central role. Following a brief discussion on virtual simulation, the paper attempts to identify a notion of virtuality based on the identification of the self (man or computer) with the problem solver. It is shown that such an identification/distinction possibly violates some general principle of the problem environment. To deal with this violation, a new problem is generated and a new virtualization act is required, in order to attain a correspondence between virtuality and reality. A better understanding of this approach requires a combination of analog and digital reasoning: the analog being related to the environment in which the problem solving is required, and the digital to the problem solver's mental activities. We will briefly analyze the recursive approach to problem solving and suggest a possible problem solving methodology based on virtuality. The paper concludes with comments on the relation between etnology and virtual reality

Distributed Intervals : a Formal Framework for Information Granulation

The notion of distributed interval, as a formal framework for information granulation, represented by the collection of finite number of general-intervals is introduced. Operations on distributed intervals are defined based on the corresponding general-intervals\u2019. Distributed intervals provide a bi-criteria framework for information granulation that can be used as a conceptually rich structure in granular computing

Context Network

Context network is the result of the integration of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and context-awareness which are primarily reconsidered in terms of granular computing. It is aimed to be reliable infrastructure for providing applicable and proper contextual information necessary for developing realistic context-aware applications

ENHANCED SENSOR NETWORK : A SPECIALIZED INFRASTRUCTURE FOR CONTEXT-AWARE APPLICATIONS

Respecting the mobile world, it is about the time to demand for systems to fully take advantage of their environment. In this way, Enhanced Sensor Network is another step toward developing realistic context-aware applications, which is based on the basic infrastructures provided by wireless sensor networks (WSN) and context-aware application development paradigms. In this paper we introduce a framework for integrating WSNs with context-aware application requirements to enhance wireless sensor network as an infrastructure which can provide necessary contextual information for context-aware applications

Distributive Justice with Production and the Social Contract : an Experimental Study

Econometica Working Papers, N.60. Drawing on the theoretical and experimental literature on distributive justice, we put some assumptions of the contractarian argument to an empirical test by means of an experiment which investigates the influence that explicit agreement under the veil of ignorance may have on individuals\u2019 conception of justice and its implementation in a context of the production and distribution of a common output. One crucial characteristic of our experiment is that subjects are assigned unequal endowments for which they are not responsible; the assignment is random. At the same time, their work naturally generates unequal levels of earnings. Do the subjects involved in this interaction distinguish between the two types of inequality? Do they try to reduce the arbitrary one, while accepting the one generated through effort? Do they elaborate other distributive criteria? Does their choice ex-ante, when they are behind the veil, differ from their choice ex-post once the veil has been lifted and they know the outcome of the production phase? The main result is that the agreement under a veil of ignorance induces subjects to accept a liberal egalitarian division rule not only in the ex-ante agreement, but also in the actual implementation of the pie division, even if this contradicts their self-interest and some common economic assumptions about reciprocal expectations of rationality. In addition, our results show that deliberating through open discussion increases the level of ex-post compliance