All Together Now

A common problem for people with disabilities, particularly those who rely on mobility devices, is learning to navigate a new environment. This is especially troublesome for students who are attending a new university and need to figure out how to get from one place to another. All Together Now is a mobile multi-player cooperative game developed for two purposes. First, the game, developed by two computer scientists and a disability studies scholar, is intended to give disabled students a fun way to learn their way around campus, learn how to report accessibility issues on that campus, and make friends with people who have similar disabilities. Second, the game can be used as a way of fostering awareness and advocacy among students without disabilities, by having them work in teams where one member is someone with a disability that causes them to rely on mobility devices. This article describes the implementation of the game within a disability studies course and the results of two pilot tests, with both disabled and non-disabled participants.

Public Provision of Goods and Services under Cost Uncertainty: The Government’s Bureaucratic Organization

The digital transition is a challenge that developed countries are currently facing. The transition process is associated with different degrees of uncertainty, which are particularly relevant for changes that have to do with the provision of goods and services produced by public administrations. Our paper uses a partial equilibrium model to study the effects of uncertainty on the public provision of goods and services produced by bureaucratic agencies, including the incentive of the government to consolidate production. We assume that bureaucratic agencies may play either a cooperative game with each other and a non-cooperative game against the government (i.e., a consolidated bureaucracy) or a non-cooperative game with each other and against the government (i.e., competing bureaus). Both the government and the bureaus face tradeoffs between maximizing the electorate preferences and extracting some political and/or bureaucratic rents. We find that a cooperative (competitive) bureaucratic solution depends on the nature of the goods produced. We find that costs’ uncertainty affects the level of public production and the way the policymakers extract their rents.

Demand Allocation and Profit Sharing to Improve Salt Farmer’s Revenue: A Cooperative Game Approach

The main problem of the salt supply chain system is the oligopoly market structure dominated by middlemen which reduces the bargaining power of farmers. It has, however, been discovered that vertical collaboration (farmers to cooperatives) and horizontal collaboration (farmers to farmers) models have the ability to increase farmers' revenue. Therefore, this research was conducted to determine the effect of both horizontal and vertical collaboration models on the salt supply chain system with the expectation to increase farmers' revenue. This involved the application of the cooperative game theory with Shapley's value used as the basis for decision making. The result showed that the collaboration of stakeholders in the salt supply chain system has the ability to increase farmers' revenue, especially when they sell a maximum of 20% of their products through cooperatives and the rest through middlemen. This means the existence of farmers as cooperative members has a positive impact as observed in the revenue increment. Therefore, it is recommended that cooperatives improve their functions and roles as providers of savings and loans and market seekers, determine the appropriate prices for salt, and improve the quality of the products produced by their members. Moreover, a collaboration between farmers is mutually beneficial and this means efforts should be made to ensure cooperation, especially for small farmers.