Constituting an Islamic social welfare function: an exploration through Islamic moral economy

Purpose This study aims to theoretically explore and examine the possibility of developing an Islamic social welfare function (ISWF) within the Islamic moral economy (IME) frame by going beyond the traditional fiqhī approach. It focuses on issues of preference ordering and utility through the normative dimension of Islamic ontology, as expressed and articulated within the IME. Design/methodology/approach Being a theoretical paper, a conceptual and critical discursive approach is used in this paper. Findings To establish an ISWF, a narrow juristic approach remains inadequate; there is a need to integrate the substantive morality to complement the juristic approach to achieve the ihsani process as the ultimate individual objective, which makes an ISWF possible. As the scattered debate on the topic concentrates mainly on the juristic approach, the main contribution of this study is to present a model in which juristic and moralist positions endogenized and augmented to constitute ISWF. Originality/value As there is a limited amount of research available on the subject matter, this paper will be an important theoretical contribution. In addition, this study develops an IME approach rather than fiqh-based approach used in the available research, which makes it novel.

Matching IoT Devices to the Fog Service Providers: A Mechanism Design Perspective

In the Internet of Things (IoT) + Fog + Cloud architecture, with the unprecedented growth of IoT devices, one of the challenging issues that needs to be tackled is to allocate Fog service providers (FSPs) to IoT devices, especially in a game-theoretic environment. Here, the issue of allocation of FSPs to the IoT devices is sifted with game-theoretic idea so that utility maximizing agents may be benign. In this scenario, we have multiple IoT devices and multiple FSPs, and the IoT devices give preference ordering over the subset of FSPs. Given such a scenario, the goal is to allocate at most one FSP to each of the IoT devices. We propose mechanisms based on the theory of mechanism design without money to allocate FSPs to the IoT devices. The proposed mechanisms have been designed in a flexible manner to address the long and short duration access of the FSPs to the IoT devices. For analytical results, we have proved the economic robustness, and probabilistic analyses have been carried out for allocation of IoT devices to the FSPs. In simulation, mechanism efficiency is laid out under different scenarios with an implementation in Python.

The pulse-like nature of decisions in rational choice theory

Is the act of making a decision a process or pulse? Critiques of rational choice theory and models often treat cognitive processes of preference ordering as part of the act of decision that should be incorporated into the models. The failure to account for human psychology, they argue, responds for RCT’s lack of predictability. However, this argument and the models of human mind, such as prospect theory, see decision as a process that begins at the cognitive considerations of preference ordering and extends up to the act of decision. In this paper, I argue that decision is analogous to a pulse rather than a process. I draw this analogy with the Dirac delta function, which in signal theory represents an unitary pulse. In the exact moment of making a decision, all preferences and contextual evaluations must have been already structured in the agent’s mind, otherwise she would not be capable of making the decision. Acknowledging the pulse-like nature of rational choice models allows modellers to eschew the incorporation of complex cognitive processes into their analyses, which has both theoretical and empirical implications to RCT’s representation of real-world phenomena.

Rank-dependent equity weights

This chapter explains how to evaluate the distributional consequences of health programmes by comparing inequality penalized measures of population health. The approach taken is founded on use of rank-dependent social welfare functions (SWFs) that evaluate population health outcomes in terms of equity-weighted average health, using weights that depend only on rank in the distribution of health. The underlying ethical principles and resource allocation implications are compared with those of the level-dependent welfare function approach introduced in the next chapter. Conditions under which quantitative results derived from a rank-dependent SWF are consistent with the preference ordering of programmes established by dominance analysis are identified. The approach is easily extended to allow for aversion to health inequality in relation to an equity-relevant variable, such as socioeconomic status.

Hurricanes, climate change, and social welfare: evidence from the Caribbean

We examine whether Caribbean islands will be worse off as hurricane activity alters under climate change. To this end, we construct island level damages for synthetic storm tracks generated from four climate models under current and future climate settings. Using a flexible stochastic dominance preference ordering framework, we find that the fat-tailed and uncertain nature of the distribution of storms makes it difficult to conclude that the region will be worse off under climate change, and is likely to depend on the degree of adaptation.

Arrow’s Theorem

Kenneth Arrow’s “impossibility” theorem is rightly considered to be a landmark result in economic theory. It is a far-reaching result with implications not just for economics but for political science, philosophy, and many other fields. It has inspired an enormous literature, “social choice theory,” which lies on the interface of economics, politics, and philosophy. Arrow first proved the impossibility theorem in his doctoral dissertation—Social Choice and Individual Values—published in 1951. It is a remarkable result, and had Arrow not proved it, it is unlikely that the theorem would be known today. A social choice is simply a choice made by, or on behalf of, a group of people. Arrow’s theorem is concerned more specifically with the following problem. Suppose that we have a given set of options to choose from and that each member of a group of individuals has his or her own preference over these options. By what method should we construct a single ranking of the options for the group as a whole? Any such method may be represented mathematically by a “social welfare function.” This is a function that receives as its input the preference ordering of each individual and then generates as its output a social preference ordering. Arrow defined some properties that would seem to be essential to any reasonable social welfare function. These properties are called “unrestricted domain,” “weak Pareto,” “independence of irrelevant alternatives,” and “non-dictatorship.” Each of these properties, when taken alone, does appear to be very necessary indeed. Yet, Arrow proved that these properties are in fact mutually incompatible. This troubling fact has been central to the study of social choice ever since.

MANAGING CONSENSUS BY MULTI-STAGE OPTIMIZATION MODELS WITH LINGUISTIC PREFERENCE ORDERINGS AND DOUBLE HIERARCHY LINGUISTIC PREFERENCES

Preference ordering structures are useful and popular tools to represent experts’ preferences in the decision making process. In the existing preference orderings, they lack the research on the precise relationship between any two adjacent alternatives in the preference orderings, and the decision making methods are unreasonable. To overcome these issues, this paper establishes a novel concept of linguistic preference ordering (LPO) in which the ordering of alternatives and the relationships between two adjacent alternatives should be fused well, and develops two transformation models to transform each LPO into the corresponding double hierarchy linguistic preference relation with complete consistency. Additionally, to fully respect the experts’ expression habits and provide more refined solutions to experts, this paper establishes a multi-stage consensus optimization model by considering the suggested preferences represented in both the continuous scale and the discrete scale, and develops a multi-stage interactive consensus reaching algorithm to deal with multi-expert decision making problem with LPOs. Furthermore, some numerical examples are presented to illustrate the developed methods and models. Finally, some comparative analyses between the proposed methods and models and some existing methods have been made to show the advantages of the proposed methods and models.