This book is a collection of selected papers presented at the Annual Meeting of the European Academy of Management and Business Economics (AEDEM), held at the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Barcelona, 05 - 07 June, 2012. This edition of the conference has been presented with the slogan "Creating new opportunities in an uncertain environment". There are different ways for assessing uncertainty in management but this book mainly focused on soft computing theories and their role in assessing uncertainty in a complex world. The present book gives a comprehensive overview of general management topics and discusses some of the most recent developments in all the areas of business and management including management, marketing, business statistics, innovation and technology, finance, sports and tourism. This book might be of great interest for anyone working in the area of management and business economics and might be especially useful for scientists and graduate students doing research in these fields.

Leading expert Paul Booth explores the growth in popularity of board games today, and unpacks what it means to read a board game. What does a game communicate? How do games play us? And how do we decide which games to play and which are just wastes of cardboard? With little scholarly research in this still-emerging field, Board Games as Media underscores the importance of board games in the ever-evolving world of media.

The aim of the book is to present the state of the art of the theory of symmetric (Hermitian) matrix Riccati equations and to contribute to the development of the theory of non-symmetric Riccati equations as well as to certain classes of coupled and generalized Riccati equations occurring in differential games and stochastic control. The volume offers a complete treatment of generalized and coupled Riccati equations. It deals with differential, discrete-time, algebraic or periodic symmetric and non-symmetric equations, with special emphasis on those equations appearing in control and systems theory. Extensions to Riccati theory allow to tackle robust control problems in a unified approach.

The book is intended to make available classical and recent results to engineers and mathematicians alike. It is accessible to graduate students in mathematics, applied mathematics, control engineering, physics or economics. Researchers working in any of the fields where Riccati equations are used can find the main results with the proper mathematical background.

This chapter is organized as follows. The economic problem on which this book focuses is motivated in Section 1. The two tools used to study this economic problem, which are real options theory and game theory, are discussed in Sections 2 and 3, respectively. Section 4 surveys the contents of this book. In Section 5 some promising extensions of the research presented in this book are listed. 1. TECHNOLOGY INVESTMENT Investment expenditures of companies govern economic growth. Es pecially investments in new and more efficient technologies are an impor tant determinant. In particular, in the last two decades an increasing part of the investment expenditures concerns investments in informa tion and communication technology. Kriebel, 1989 notes that (already) in 1989 roughly 50 percent of new corporate capital expenditures by major United States companies was in information and communication technology. Due to the rapid progress in these technologies, the tech nology investment decision of the individual firm has become a very complex matter. As an example of the very high pace of technological improvement consider the market for personal computers. IBM intro duced its Pentium personal computers in the early 1990s at the same price at which it introduced its 80286 personal computers in the 1980s. Therefore it took less than a decade to improve on the order of twenty times in terms of both speed and memory capacities, without increasing the cost (Yorukoglu, 1998)."

This book covers the latest advances in playful user interfaces - interfaces that invite social and physical interaction. These new developments include the use of audio, visual, tactile and physiological sensors to monitor, provide feedback and anticipate the behavior of human users. The decreasing cost of sensor and actuator technology makes it possible to integrate physical behavior information in human-computer interactions. This leads to many new entertainment and game applications that allow or require social and physical interaction in sensor- and actuator-equipped smart environments. The topics discussed include: human-nature interaction, human-animal interaction and the interaction with tangibles that are naturally integrated in our smart environments. Digitally supported remote audience participation in artistic or sport events is also discussed. One important theme that emerges throughout the book is the involvement of users in the digital-entertainment design process or even design and implementation of interactive entertainment by users themselves, including children doing so in educational settings.

This book provides a comprehensive and practically minded introduction into serious games for law enforcement agencies. Serious games offer wide ranging benefits for law enforcement with applications from professional trainings to command-level decision making to the preparation for crises events. This book explains the conceptual foundations of virtual and augmented reality, gamification and simulation. It further offers practical guidance on the process of serious games development from user requirements elicitation to evaluation. The chapters are intended to provide principles, as well as hands-on knowledge to plan, design, test and apply serious games successfully in a law enforcement environment. A diverse set of case studies showcases the enormous variety that is possible in serious game designs and application areas and offers insights into concrete design decisions, design processes, benefits and challenges. The book is meant for law enforcement professionals interested in commissioning their own serious games as well as game designers interested in collaborative pedagogy and serious games for the law enforcement and security sector.

This book has its focus on the dynamics of oligopoly games. Several contributions show how easily the unique Nash equilibria in some most traditional oligopoly models may lose stability, giving way to complex phenomena, such as periodic/chaotic processes, and to multi stability of coexistent attractors. The bifurcations producing these phenomena are studied by means of recently accumulated global methods, based on the use of critical curves. These tools are explained in a separate methodological chapter. The book also contains some historical background of the present theory. In this way the book becomes suitable also as an advanced text for industrial organisation courses. The various models presented in the book focus both classical Cournot types, and Hotelling`s "ice cream vendor" problems, including location choice. The author list comprises some of the most prolific contributors to current dynamic oligopoly modelling.

This book focuses on various aspects of dynamic game theory, presenting state-of-the-art research and serving as a testament to the vitality and growth of the field of dynamic games and their applications. Its contributions, written by experts in their respective disciplines, are outgrowths of presentations originally given at the 14th International Symposium of Dynamic Games and Applications held in Banff.

"Advances in Dynamic Games" covers a variety of topics, ranging from evolutionary games, theoretical developments in game theory and algorithmic methods to applications, examples, and analysis in fields as varied as mathematical biology, environmental management, finance and economics, engineering, guidance and control, and social interaction. Featured throughout are valuable tools and resources for researchers, practitioners, and graduate students interested in dynamic games and their applications to mathematics, engineering, economics, and management science. "

This is the fourth edition of a book that, after circulating in the form of l- ture notes at the universities of Rome (now La Sapienza University of Rome) and Siena in the late 1960s, was originally published in 1971 under the titleMat- maticalMethodsandModelsinEconomicDynamics. Inthosefortyoddyearstwo main developments have occurred in economic dynamics. The ?rst is the much greater amount of advanced mathematics that is being used today with respect to the past. The second is the increasing importance of non-linear modelling as contrastedwiththelinearapproach(which, however, hasnotgoneoutoffashion). This fourth edition re?ects both developments. It contains additional advanced mathematical tools, and a larger amount of non-linear mathematics and appli- tions. These developments are re?ected especially in Part III, that now accounts forwellover50%ofthebook. ItgoeswithoutsayingthatIhavemadeeverye?ort topreservetheuser-friendlyfeatureofthepreviouseditions: thespiritofthebook hasremainedthesame, namelytogiveacomprehensive, butsimple, treatmentof the mathematical methods commonly used in dynamical economics, and to show how they are applied to build and analyse economic models. Accordingly, the focus is on methods, and every mathematical technique - troduced is followed by its application to selected economic models that serve as examples. Theunifyingprincipleintheexpositionofthedi?erenteconomicm- els is then seen to be the common mathematical technique. This process will enable the readers not only to understand the basic literature, but also to build and analyse their own model

The game-theoretic modelling of negotiations has been an active research area for the past five decades, that started with the seminal work by Nobel laureate John Nash in the early 1950s. This book provides a survey of some of the major developments in the field of strategic bargaining models with an emphasize on the role of threats in the negotiation process. Threats are all actions outside the negotiation room that negotiators have ate their disposal and the use of these actions affect the bargaining position of all negotiators. Of course, each negotiator aims to strengthen his own position. Examples of threats are the announcement of a strike by a union in centralized wage bargaining, or a nation's announcement of a trade war directed against other nations in negotiations for trade liberalization. This book is organized on the basis of a simple guiding principle: The situation in which none of the parties involved in the negotiations has threats at its disposal is the natural benchmark for negotiations where the parties can make threats. Also on the technical level, negotiations with variable threats build on and extend the techniques applied in analyzing bargaining situations without threats. The first part of this book, containing chapter 3-6, presents the no-threat case, and the second part, containing chapter 7-10, extends the analysis for negotiation situations where threats are present. A consistent and unifying framework is provided first in 2.

Extending the well-known connection between classical linear potential theory and probability theory (through the interplay between harmonic functions and martingales) to the nonlinear case of tug-of-war games and their related partial differential equations, this unique book collects several results in this direction and puts them in an elementary perspective in a lucid and self-contained fashion.

This contributed volume contains fourteen papers based on selected presentations from the European Conference on Game Theory SING11-GTM 2015, held at Saint Petersburg State University in July 2015, and the Networking Games and Management workshop, held at the Karelian Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Petrozvavodsk, Russia, also in July 2015. These papers cover a wide range of topics in game theory, including recent advances in areas with high potential for future work, as well as new developments on classical results. Some of these include A new approach to journal ranking using methods from social choice theory; A differential game of a duopoly in which two firms are competing for market share in an industry with network externalities; The impact of information propagation in the model of tax audits; A voting model in which the results of previous votes can affect the process of coalition formation in a decision-making body; The Selten-Szidarovsky technique for the analysis of Nash equilibria of games with an aggregative structure; Generalized nucleoli and generalized bargaining sets for games with restricted cooperation; Bayesian networks and games of deterrence; and A new look at the study of solutions for games in partition function form. The maturity and vitality of modern-day game theory are reflected in the new ideas, novel applications, and contributions of young researchers represented in this collection. It will be of interest to anyone doing theoretical research in game theory or working on one its numerous applications.

Though the game-theoretic approach has been vastly studied and utilized in relation to economics of industrial organizations, it has hardly been used to tackle safety management in multi-plant chemical industrial settings. Using Game Theory for Improving Safety within Chemical Industrial Parks presents an in-depth discussion of game-theoretic modeling which may be applied to improve cross-company prevention and -safety management in a chemical industrial park. By systematically analyzing game-theoretic models and approaches in relation to managing safety in chemical industrial parks, Using Game Theory for Improving Safety within Chemical Industrial Parks explores the ways game theory can predict the outcome of complex strategic investment decision making processes involving several adjacent chemical plants. A number of game-theoretic decision models are discussed to provide strategic tools for decision-making situations. Offering clear and straightforward explanations of methodologies, Using Game Theory for Improving Safety within Chemical Industrial Parks provides managers and management teams with approaches to asses situations and to improve strategic safety- and prevention arrangements.

Networks and Network Analysis for Defence and Security discusses relevant theoretical frameworks and applications of network analysis in support of the defence and security domains. This book details real world applications of network analysis to support defence and security. Shocks to regional, national and global systems stemming from natural hazards, acts of armed violence, terrorism and serious and organized crime have significant defence and security implications. Today, nations face an uncertain and complex security landscape in which threats impact/target the physical, social, economic and cyber domains. Threats to national security, such as that against critical infrastructures not only stem from man-made acts but also from natural hazards. Katrina (2005), Fukushima (2011) and Hurricane Sandy (2012) are examples highlighting the vulnerability of critical infrastructures to natural hazards and the crippling effect they have on the social and economic well-being of a community and a nation. With this dynamic and complex threat landscape, network analysis has emerged as a key enabler in supporting defence and security. With the advent of big data and increasing processing power, network analysis can reveal insights with regards to structural and dynamic properties thereby facilitating greater understanding of complex networks, their entities, interdependencies, vulnerabilities to produce insights for creative solutions. This book will be well positioned to inform defence, security and intelligence professionals and researchers with regards to leading methodologies and approaches."

Our everyday life is in?uenced by many unexpected (dif?cult to predict) events usually referred as a chance. Probably, we all are as we are due to the accumulation point of a multitude of chance events. Gambling games that have been known to human beings nearly from the beginning of our civilization are based on chance events. These chance events have created the dream that everybody can easily become rich. This pursuit made gambling so popular. This book is devoted to the dynamics of the mechanical randomizers and we try to solve the problem why mechanical device (roulette) or a rigid body (a coin or a die) operating in the way described by the laws of classical mechanics can behave in such a way and produce a pseudorandom outcome. During mathematical lessons in primary school we are taught that the outcome of the coin tossing experiment is random and that the probability that the tossed coin lands heads (tails) up is equal to 1/2. Approximately, at the same time during physics lessons we are told that the motion of the rigid body (coin is an example of suchabody)isfullydeterministic. Typically,studentsarenotgiventheanswertothe question Why this duality in the interpretation of the simple mechanical experiment is possible? Trying to answer this question we describe the dynamics of the gambling games based on the coin toss, the throw of the die, and the roulette run.

This present book provides an alternative approach to study the pre-kernel solution of transferable utility games based on a generalized conjugation theory from convex analysis. Although the pre-kernel solution possesses an appealing axiomatic foundation that lets one consider this solution concept as a standard of fairness, the pre-kernel and its related solutions are regarded as obscure and too technically complex to be treated as a real alternative to the Shapley value. Comprehensible and efficient computability is widely regarded as a desirable feature to qualify a solution concept apart from its axiomatic foundation as a standard of fairness. We review and then improve an approach to compute the pre-kernel of a cooperative game by the indirect function. The indirect function is known as the Fenchel-Moreau conjugation of the characteristic function. Extending the approach with the indirect function, we are able to characterize the pre-kernel of the grand coalition simply by the solution sets of a family of quadratic objective functions.

This book explores the theoretical foundations of co-utility as well as its application to a number of areas, including distributed reputation management, anonymous keyword search, collaborative data anonymization, digital oblivion, peer-to-peer (P2P) content distribution, ridesharing for sustainable mobility, environmental economy, business model design and the collaborative economy. It evolved from presentations at the 1st Co-Utility Workshop, "held in Tarragona, Spain, on March 10-11, 2016." How can we guarantee that a global society without a common legal framework operates smoothly? If generosity, honesty and helpfulness do not arise spontaneously, one approach would be to design transactions so that helping others remains the best rational option. This is precisely the goal of co-utility, which can be defined in game-theoretic terms as any interaction between peers in which the best option for a player to maximize her or his utility is to make sure the other players also enjoy a fair share of utility (for example, functionality, security or privacy). Therefore, a protocol or mechanism designed using the co-utility principle ensures that helping others is the best rational option, even if players are selfish.

This collection of papers investigates the most recent debates about individualism and holism in the philosophy of social science. The debates revolve mainly around two issues: firstly, whether social phenomena exist "sui generis" and how they relate to individuals. This is the focus of discussions between ontological individualists and ontological holists. Secondly, to what extent social scientific explanations may and should, focus on individuals and social phenomena respectively. This issue is debated amongst methodological holists and methodological individualists.

In social science and philosophy, both issues have been intensively discussed and new versions of the dispute have appeared just as new arguments have been advanced. At present, the individualism/holism debate is extremely lively and this book reflects the major positions and perspectives within the debate. This volume is also relevant to debates about two closely related issues in social science: the micro-macro debate and the agency-structure debate.

This book presents contributions from key figures in both social science and philosophy, in the first such collection on this topic to be published since the 1970s.

This contributed volume offers a collection of papers presented at the 2016 Network Games, Control, and Optimization conference (NETGCOOP), held at the University of Avignon in France, November 23-25, 2016. These papers highlight the increasing importance of network control and optimization in many networking application domains, such as mobile and fixed access networks, computer networks, social networks, transportation networks, and, more recently, electricity grids and biological networks. Covering a wide variety of both theoretical and applied topics in the areas listed above, the authors explore several conceptual and algorithmic tools that are needed for efficient and robust control operation, performance optimization, and better understanding the relationships between entities that may be acting cooperatively or selfishly in uncertain and possibly adversarial environments. As such, this volume will be of interest to applied mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, and researchers in other related fields.

Strategic Interaction and Markets explores the theoretical richness of economic contexts such as product differentiation, strategic barriers to entry, and imperfect information, where economic agents act strategically taking into account the impact of their behaviour on competitors' behaviour and prices. This non-ideal form of competition is the standard result when competition is amongst a small number of agents. Designed as an ancillary text for graduate students, this book is an accessible introduction to the applications of a complex area of mathematical economics.

This book demonstrates how to apply modern approaches to complex system control in practical applications involving knowledge-based systems. The dimensions of knowledge-based systems are extended by incorporating new perspectives from control theory, multimodal systems and simulation methods. The book is divided into three parts: theory, production system and information system applications. One of its main focuses is on an agent-based approach to complex system analysis. Moreover, specialised forms of knowledge-based systems (like e-learning, social network, and production systems) are introduced with a new formal approach to knowledge system modelling. The book, which offers a valuable resource for researchers engaged in complex system analysis, is the result of a unique cooperation between scientists from applied computer science (mainly from Poland) and leading system control theory researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences' Trapeznikov Institute of Control Sciences.

This is the second of three volumes surveying the state of the art in Game Theory and its applications to many and varied fields, in particular to economics. The chapters in the present volume are contributed by outstanding authorities, and provide comprehensive coverage and precise statements of the main results in each area. The applications include empirical evidence. The following topics are covered: communication and correlated equilibria, coalitional games and coalition structures, utility and subjective probability, common knowledge, bargaining, zero-sum games, differential games, and applications of game theory to signalling, moral hazard, search, evolutionary biology, international relations, voting procedures, social choice, public economics, politics, and cost allocation. This handbook will be of interest to scholars in economics, political science, psychology, mathematics and biology. For more information on the Handbooks in Economics series, please see our home page on http: //www.elsevier.nl/locate/hes

This book introduces methods for uncertain multi-attribute decision making including uncertain multi-attribute group decision making and their applications to supply chain management, investment decision making, personnel assessment, redesigning products, maintenance services, military system efficiency evaluation. Multi-attribute decision making, also known as multi-objective decision making with finite alternatives, is an important component of modern decision science. The theory and methods of multi-attribute decision making have been extensively applied in engineering, economics, management and military contexts, such as venture capital project evaluation, facility location, bidding, development ranking of industrial sectors and so on. Over the last few decades, great attention has been paid to research on multi-attribute decision making in uncertain settings, due to the increasing complexity and uncertainty of supposedly objective aspects and the fuzziness of human thought. This book can be used as a reference guide for researchers and practitioners working in e.g. the fields of operations research, information science, management science and engineering. It can also be used as a textbook for postgraduate and senior undergraduate students.