Transnational Cooperation: An Issue-Based Approach presents an analysis of transnational cooperation or collective action that stresses basic concepts and intuition. Throughout the book, authors Clint Peinhardt and Todd Sandler identify factors that facilitate and/or inhibit such cooperation. The first four chapters lay the analytical foundations for the book, while the next nine chapters apply the analysis to a host of exigencies and topics of great import. The authors use elementary game theory as a tool for illustrating the ideas put forth in the text. Game theory reminds us that rational actors (for example, countries, firms, or individuals) must account for the responses by other rational actors. The book assumes no prior knowledge of game theory; all game-theoretic concepts and analyses are explained in detail to the reader. Peinhardt and Sandler also employ paired comparisons in illustrating the book's concepts. The book is rich in applications and covers a wide range of topics, including superbugs, civil wars, money laundering, financial crises, drug trafficking, terrorism, global health concerns, international trade liberalization, acid rain, leadership, sovereignty, and many others. Students, researchers, and policymakers alike have much to gain from Transnational Cooperation. It is a crossover book for economics, political science, and public policy.

The Handbook of Experimental Game Theory offers a comprehensive analysis of the field, discussing foundational topics that are at the core of applied game theory. It highlights the nuances that scientific experiments have delivered to our understanding of strategic interactions among decision makers. Leading experts explore methodological considerations and games of complete and incomplete information to offer new directions for research in experimental game theory. Chapters demonstrate transformative behavioral research focused on classic topics in game theory such as cooperation and coordination games. Taking a scientific approach to the study of game theory, this innovative Handbook provides an insight into laboratory and field experiments that test game theoretic propositions and suggests new ways of modeling strategic behavior. It takes a forward-thinking position, addressing the challenges inherent in innovations surrounding the measurement of strategic behavior using experimental methods. This Handbook will prove to be a valuable resource for scholars and students who are looking to gain a broader understanding of experimental game theory and how to contribute to its advancement. It will also be of particular interest to researchers in experimental and behavioral economics.

Economic theory and philosophy have discussed concepts of fairness, but the criteria of fairness are in each case absolute: a situation is either fair or it is not. This book draws on these literatures to propose two criteria of relative fairness, and a hierarchical rule for the priority of application of these criteria, with a view to comparison of practicable alternatives in public policy. A veil-of-ignorance device of representation of rational fairness is used to argue that these criteria are normatively relevant. Applications to intergenerational fairness, fairness among regions in the context of migration, externalities and Pigovian taxes, to fair prices and wages, and to relative fairness in the status of racial and caste groups are sketched. The book is designed with real world public policy practice. Scholars with an interest in the economic evaluation of public policy will find this compelling book essential reading.

Visual novels (VNs), a ludic video game genre that pairs textual fiction stories with anime-like images and varying degrees of interactivity, have increased in popularity among Western audiences in recent years. Despite originating in Japan, these stories have made their way into global culture as a genre accessible for both play and creation with wide-ranging themes from horror and loneliness to sexuality. The History and Allure of Interactive Visual Novels begins with a comprehensive overview of the visual novel genre and the cultural evolution that led to its rise, then explains the tropes and appeal of subgenres like bishojo (cute girl games), detective games, horror, and eroge (erotic games). Finally, the book explores the future of the genre in both user-generated games and games from other genres that liberally borrow both narrative and ludological themes from visual novels. Whether you’re a long-standing fan of the genre or a newcomer looking for a fresh experience, The History and Allure of Interactive Visual Novels will provide an accessible and critically engaging overview of a genre that is rich in storytelling yet often overlooked.

Extremum Seeking through Delays and PDEs, the first book on the topic, expands the scope of applicability of the extremum seeking method, from static and finite-dimensional systems to infinite-dimensional systems. Readers will find: Numerous algorithms for model-free real-time optimization are developed and their convergence guaranteed. Extensions from single-player optimization to noncooperative games, under delays and pdes, are provided. The delays and pdes are compensated in the control designs using the pde backstepping approach, and stability is ensured using infinite-dimensional versions of averaging theory. Accessible and powerful tools for analysis. This book is intended for control engineers in all disciplines (electrical, mechanical, aerospace, chemical), mathematicians, physicists, biologists, and economists. It is appropriate for graduate students, researchers, and industrial users.

Developments in the use of game theory have impacted multiple fields and created opportunities for new applications. With the ubiquity of these developments, there is an increase in the overall utilization of this approach. Game Theory: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice contains a compendium of the latest academic material on the usage, strategies, and applications for implementing game theory across a variety of industries and fields. Including innovative studies on economics, military strategy, and political science, this multi-volume book is an ideal source for professionals, practitioners, graduate students, academics, and researchers interested in the applications of game theory.

This book presents a short introduction to continuous-time financial models. An overview of the basics of stochastic analysis precedes a focus on the Black-Scholes and interest rate models. Other topics covered include self-financing strategies, option pricing, exotic options and risk-neutral probabilities. Vasicek, Cox-Ingersoll-Ross, and Heath-Jarrow-Morton interest rate models are also explored. The author presents practitioners with a basic introduction, with more rigorous information provided for mathematicians. The reader is assumed to be familiar with the basics of probability theory. Some basic knowledge of stochastic integration and differential equations theory is preferable, although all preliminary information is given in the first part of the book. Some relatively simple theoretical exercises are also provided.

Through analysis of three case study videogames - Left 4 Dead 2, DayZ and Minecraft - and their online player communities, Digital Zombies, Undead Stories develops a framework for understanding how collective gameplay generates experiences of narrative, as well as the narrative dimensions of players' creative activity on social media platforms. Narrative emergence is addressed as a powerful form of player experience in multiplayer games, one which makes individual games' boundaries and meanings fluid and negotiable by players. The phenomenon is also shown to be recursive in nature, shaping individual and collective understandings of videogame texts over time. Digital Zombies, Undead Stories focuses on games featuring zombies as central antagonists. The recurrent figure of the videogame zombie, which mediates between chaos and rule-driven predictability, serves as both metaphor and mascot for narrative emergence. This book argues that in the zombie genre, emergent experiences are at the heart of narrative experiences for players, and more broadly demonstrates the potential for the phenomenon to be understood as a fundamental part of everyday play experiences across genres.

This book presents a crisis scenario generator with black swans, black butterflies and worst case scenarios. It is the most useful scenario generator that can be used to manage assets in a crisis-prone period, offering more reliable values for Value at Risk (VaR), Conditional Value at Risk (CVaR) and Tail Value at Risk (TVaR). Hazardous Forecasts and Crisis Scenario Generator questions how to manage assets when crisis probability increases, enabling you to adopt a process for using generators in order to be well prepared for handling crises.

The advent of the internet largely changed the landscape of marketing to adopt a wide variety of communication techniques and creative selling on virtual platforms. Gaming provides a highly pervasive and influential mode of offering new media communication to consumers that can be further improved by digital innovation. Application of Gaming in New Media Marketing is a collection of vital research on the methods and applications of gaming in marketing, including its growth, recent trends, practices, issues, and main challenges. Highlighting a range of topics including digital advertising, media planning, and social media marketing, this book is ideally designed for marketers, software developers, managers, business researchers, academicians, and graduate-level students seeking current research on new and innovative methods to reach and connect with audiences through games in a highly interactive, measurable, and focused way.

This book includes up-to-date contributions in the broadly defined area of probabilistic analysis of voting rules and decision mechanisms. Featuring papers from all fields of social choice and game theory, it presents probability arguments to allow readers to gain a better understanding of the properties of decision rules and of the functioning of modern democracies. In particular, it focuses on the legacy of William Gehrlein and Dominique Lepelley, two prominent scholars who have made important contributions to this field over the last fifty years. It covers a range of topics, including (but not limited to) computational and technical aspects of probability approaches, evaluation of the likelihood of voting paradoxes, power indices, empirical evaluations of voting rules, models of voters' behavior, and strategic voting. The book gathers articles written in honor of Gehrlein and Lepelley along with original works written by the two scholars themselves.

This is a guide, in theory and in practice, to how current technological changes have impacted our interaction with texts and with each other. Henry Sussman rereads pivotal moments in literary, philosophical and cultural modernity as anticipating the cybernetic discourse that has increasingly defined theory since the computer revolution. Cognitive science, psychoanalysis and systems theory are paralleled to current trends in literary and philosophical theory. Chapters alternate between theory and readings of literary texts, resulting in a broad but rigorously grounded framework for the relation between literature and computer science. This book is a refreshing perspective on the analog-orientated tradition of theory in the humanities - and offers the first literary-textual genealogy of the digital.

Economic archaeology and ancient economic history have boomed the past decades. The former thanks to greatly enhanced techniques to identify, collect, and interpret material remains as proxies for economic interactions and performance; the latter by embracing the frameworks of new institutional economics. Both disciplines, however, still have great difficulty talking with each other. There is no reliable method to convert ancient proxy-data into the economic indicators used in economic history. In turn, the shared cultural belief-systems underlying institutions and the symbolic ways in which these are reproduced remain invisible in the material record. This book explores ways to bring both disciplines closer together by building a theoretical and methodological framework to evaluate and integrate archaeological proxy-data in economic history research. Rather than the linear interpretations offered by neoclassical or neomalthusian models, we argue that complexity economics, based on system theory, offers a promising way forward.

In everyday life we must often reach decisions while knowing that the outcome will not only depend on our own choice, but also on the choices of others. These situations are the focus of epistemic game theory. Unlike classical game theory, it explores how people may reason about their opponents before they make their final choice in a game. Packed with examples and practical problems based on stories from everyday life, this is the first textbook to explain the principles of epistemic game theory. Each chapter is dedicated to one particular, natural way of reasoning. The book then shows how each of these ways of reasoning will affect the final choices that can rationally be made and how these choices can be found by iterative procedures. Moreover, it does so in a way that uses elementary mathematics and does not presuppose any previous knowledge of game theory.

This publication contributes to the serious games field by investigating original contributions and methods that use serious games in various domains. This comprehensive and timely publication works as an essential reference source, building on the available literature in the field of Serious Games for the economic and social development of countries while providing for further research opportunities in this dynamic and growing field. Thus, the book provides the opportunity for a reflection on this important issue, increasing the understanding of the importance of Serious Games in the context of organizations' improvements, providing relevant academic work, empirical research findings, and an overview of this relevant field of study. This text provides the resources necessary for policy makers, technology developers and managers to adopt and implement solutions for a more digital era.

This book is an original-the first-ever treatment of the mathematics of Luck. Setting out from the principle that luck can be measured by the gap between reasonable expectation and eventual realization, the book develops step-by-step a mathematical theory that accommodates the entire range of our pre-systematic understanding of the way in which luck functions in human affairs. In so moving from explanatory exposition to mathematical treatment, the book provides a clear and accessible account of the way in which luck assessment enters into the calculations of rational decision theory.

This book presents the fundamentals of evolutionary game theory and applies them to the analysis of epidemics, which is of paramount importance in the aftermath of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. The primary objective of this monograph is to deliver a powerful tool to model and analyze the spread of an infectious disease during a pandemic as well as the human decision dynamics. The book employs a variant of the "vaccination game," in which a mathematical epidemiological model dovetails with evolutionary game theory. From a social physics standpoint, this book introduces an extended concept of the vaccination game starting from the fundamental issues and touching on the newest practical applications. The book first outlines the fundamental basis of evolutionary game theory, in which a two-player and two-strategy game, the so-called 2 x 2 game, and a multi-player game are concisely introduced, and the important issue of how social dilemmas are quantified is highlighted. Subsequently, the book discusses various recent applications of the extended concept of the vaccination game so as to quantitatively evaluate provisions other than vaccination, including practical intermediate protective measures such as mask-wearing, efficiency of quarantine compared with that of isolation policies for suppressing epidemics, efficiency of preemptive versus late vaccination, and optimal subsidy policies for vaccination.

This book contains international perspectives that unifies the themes of strategic management, decision theory, and data science. It contains thought-provoking presentations of case studies backed by adequate analysis adding significance to the discussions. Most of the decision-making models in use do take due advantage of collection and processing of relevant data using appropriate analytics oriented to provide inputs into effective decision-making. The book showcases applications in diverse fields including banking and insurance, portfolio management, inventory analysis, performance assessment of comparable economic agents, managing utilities in a health-care facility, reducing traffic snarls on highways, monitoring achievement of some of the sustainable development goals in a country or state, and similar other areas that showcase policy implications. It holds immense value for researchers as well as professionals responsible for organizational decisions.

This proceedings book presents state-of-the-art developments in theory, methodology, and applications of network analysis across sociology, computational science, education research, literature studies, political science, international relations, social media research, and urban studies. The papers comprising this collection were presented at the Fifth 'Networks in the Global World' conference organized by the Centre for German and European Studies of St. Petersburg University and Bielefeld University and held on July 7-9, 2020. This biannual conference series revolves around key interdisciplinary issues in the focus of network analysts, such as the multidimensional approach to social reality, translation of theories and methods across disciplines, and mixing of data and methods. The distinctive features of this book are the emphasis on in-depth linkages between theory, method, and applications, the blend of qualitative and quantitative methods, and the joint consideration of different network levels, types, and contexts. The topics covered by the papers include interrelation of social and cultural structures, constellations of power, and patterns of interaction in areas ranging from various types of communities (local, international, educational, political, and so on) to social media and literature. The book is useful for practicing researchers, graduate and postgraduate students, and educators interested in network analysis of social relations, politics, economy, and culture. Features that set the book apart from others in the field: * The book offers a unique cross-disciplinary blend of computational and ethnographic network analyses applied to a diverse spectrum of spheres, from literature and education to urban planning and policymaking. * Embracing conceptual, methodological, and empirical works, the book is among the few in network analysis to emphasize connections between theory, method, and applications. * The book brings together authors and empirical contexts from all over the globe, with a particular emphasis on European societies.

This book is devoted to game theory and its applications to environmental problems, economics, and management. It collects contributions originating from the 12th International Conference on "Game Theory and Management" 2018 (GTM2018) held at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia, from 27 to 29 June 2018.

This book provides a timely and comprehensive overview of current theories and methods in fuzzy logic, as well as relevant applications in a variety of fields of science and technology. Dedicated to Lotfi A. Zadeh on his one year death anniversary, the book goes beyond a pure commemorative text. Yet, it offers a fresh perspective on a number of relevant topics, such as computing with words, theory of perceptions, possibility theory, and decision-making in a fuzzy environment. Written by Zadeh's closest colleagues and friends, the different chapters are intended both as a timely reference guide and a source of inspiration for scientists, developers and researchers who have been dealing with fuzzy sets or would like to learn more about their potential for their future research.

Based on the "Fourth International Conference on Dynamics of Disasters" (Kalamata, Greece, July 2019), this volume includes contributions from experts who share their latest discoveries on natural and unnatural disasters. Authors provide overviews of the tactical points involved in disaster relief, outlines of hurdles from mitigation and preparedness to response and recovery, and uses for mathematical models to describe natural and man-made disasters. Topics covered include economics, optimization, machine learning, government, management, business, humanities, engineering, medicine, mathematics, computer science, behavioral studies, emergency services, and environmental studies will engage readers from a wide variety of fields and backgrounds.