Publications

February 2022
Technical Note

Ethical Analysis: Fairness

By: Nien-hê Hsieh

Concerns about fairness can arise across a wide range of contexts. They include the treatment of others, how much things cost, how much workers are paid, the outcome of a decision, and how we assign benefits and burdens across individuals. What counts as fair in a... View Details

Keywords: Fairness; Management Practices and Processes; Decision Choices and Conditions

Educators

Purchase

October 2011
Article

Fair Pricing

By: Julio J. Rotemberg

This paper explores the consequences of supposing that consumers see a firm as fair if they cannot reject the hypothesis that the firm is somewhat benevolent towards them. When consumers can reject this hypothesis, some become angry, which is costly to the firm. The... View Details

Keywords: Price; Income; Consumer Behavior; Fair Value Accounting; Outcome or Result

Article

Preventing Fairness Gerrymandering: Auditing and Learning for Subgroup Fairness

By: Michael J Kearns, Seth Neel, Aaron Leon Roth and Zhiwei Steven Wu

The most prevalent notions of fairness in machine learning are statistical definitions: they fix a small collection of pre-defined groups, and then ask for parity of some statistic of the classifier (like classification rate or false positive rate) across these groups.... View Details

Keywords: Machine Learning; Algorithms; Fairness; Mathematical Methods

17 Jan 2017
Blog Post

2017 Harvard Startup Fair

Are you a startup looking for talent? For the seventh straight year, Harvard is hosting the Startup Career Fair to showcase innovative startups developing diverse new products and ideas. This Fair is a... View Details

Keywords: All Industries

2022
Article

Regulatory Treatment of Changes in Fair Value and the Composition of Banks' Investment Portfolios

By: Michael Iselin, Jung Koo Kang and Joshua Madsen

In their implementation of Basel III, U.S. bank regulators are again including changes in the fair value of available-for-sale (AFS) debt securities in Tier 1 capital, but only for the largest U.S. banks. This paper investigates a potential impact of expanding this... View Details

Keywords: Fair Value Accounting; SFAS 115; Basel III; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Banks and Banking; Debt Securities; Credit; Risk and Uncertainty; Investment Portfolio; Decision Making; Banking Industry; United States

SSRN

The Price of Fairness

We study resource allocation problems that involve multiple self-interested parties and a central decision maker. We introduce and study the price of fairness, which is the... View Details

Preventing Fairness Gerrymandering: Auditing and Learning for Subgroup Fairness

We introduce a new family of fairness definitions that interpolate between statistical and individual notions of fairness, obtaining some of the best properties of each. We show that checking whether these notions are satisfied is computationally hard in the worst... View Details

Fair Competition

I began researching the topic of fair competition in graduate school, where I became fascinated with Louis Brandeis’s advocacy for so-called fair trade laws. These laws looked a lot like price-fixing to me,... View Details

2019
Working Paper

Southern Responses to Gold Certification: Cooperate, Compete, Reject, Revise

By: Kristin Sippl

Artisanal gold mining is a Southern subsistence livelihood posing both challenges and opportunities for sustainable development. In 2011, Fairtrade International launched a certification program to address sustainability problems in the sector. Southern activists,... View Details

Keywords: Eco-labeling; Extractive Industries; Emerging Economies; Fair Trade; Environmental Sustainability; Standards; Programs; Governance Compliance; Competition; Adaptation; Mining Industry

20 Sep 2012

MBA Fair

2018
Working Paper

Hot or Not? What Makes Product Categories Attractive to Fair Trade and Eco-labeling Organizations

By: Kristin Sippl

This paper probes extant theory on product diversification in the empirical realm of fair trade and eco-labeling organizations (i.e., certification organizations). While much is known about diversification in for-profit firms, less is known about the more complex... View Details

Keywords: Hybrid Organizations; Fair Trade; Eco-labeling; Goods and Commodities; Diversification; Strategy

January – February 2011
Article

The Price of Fairness

By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Vivek F. Farias and Nikolaos Trichakis

In this paper we study resource allocation problems that involve multiple self-interested parties or players and a central decision maker. We introduce and study the price of fairness, which is the relative system efficiency loss under a "fair" allocation assuming that... View Details

Keywords: Price; Fairness

2014
Working Paper

Private Equity's Diversification Illusion: Economic Comovement and Fair Value Reporting

By: Kyle Travis Welch

This study examines how accounting has informed private equity diversification claims and demand for private equity investments. Despite research showing private equity lacks portfolio diversification benefits, those marketing private equity assets continue to... View Details

SSRN

01 Feb 2002
News

Design Fair

Second-year students in Associate Professor Stefan Thomke's elective MBA course Managing Product Development presented their final projects at the tenth annual Design Fair in December. Among those who displayed their wares at the Spangler... View Details

Keywords: MIT Media Lab; Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services

01 Sep 2010
News

Fair Trade

consumers in each market . The incorporation of local ideals concerning skin lightness into global brands provides one example of challenges arising from incorporating local identities into brands. In India, Hindustan Lever’s Fair &... View Details

Keywords: Garry Emmons; Chemical Manufacturing; Manufacturing; Health and Personal Care Stores; Retail Trade

2011
Book

Fair Value Measurements Answer Book

By: H. David Sherman

Save time and eliminate uncertainties with the Fair Value Measurements Answer Book (formerly the FAS 157 Answer Book), the most comprehensive and authoritative resource for getting quick and accurate information about the adoption, planning, and implementation of ASC... View Details

Keywords: ASC Topic 820; Fair Value Accounting; Corporate Disclosure

Purchase

The Impact of Scheduling Fairness on Employee Turnover

Employee turnover remains one of the most persistent challenges across industries, with the leisure and hospitality sector experiencing some of the highest quit rates in the United States. This issue is particularly pronounced in restaurants, where the average... View Details

2013
Comment

Fairness and Redistribution: Comment

By: Rafael Di Tella and Juan Dubra

In an influential paper, Alesina and Angeletos (2005)—henceforth, AA—argued that a preference for fairness could lead two identical societies to choose different economic systems. In particular, two equilibria might arise: one with low taxes and a belief that the... View Details

Keywords: Taxes; Beliefs; Economic Systems; Values and Beliefs; Fairness; Taxation

14 Aug 2017
Conference Presentation

A Convex Framework for Fair Regression

By: Richard Berk, Hoda Heidari, Shahin Jabbari, Matthew Joseph, Michael J. Kearns, Jamie Morgenstern, Seth Neel and Aaron Roth

We introduce a flexible family of fairness regularizers for (linear and logistic) regression problems. These regularizers all enjoy convexity, permitting fast optimization, and they span the range from notions of group fairness to strong individual fairness. By varying... View Details

Keywords: Regression Models; Machine Learning; Fairness; Framework; Mathematical Methods