Renowned probability theorist Edward O. Thorp revolutionized the casino industry by developing card counting systems for the casino game of blackjack. Les Golden, the celebrated blackjack, roulette, and craps columnist for Bluff Europe, Gambling.com, iGaming Business, GamblingOnline, and Jackpots Review magazines, tells Thorp's incredible true story of lucrative applied probability with charm, wit, and humor. Whether you visit casinos for fun, dinner money, or a living, or whether you're simply interested in a story of romance and casino intrigue, this lively biographical novel will capture and delight you. Illustrations by the author. "I found the story tremendously entertaining, with a pantheon of compelling characters such as gambler Ed Thorp and bookie Manny Kimmel taking us from the casinos of Nevada to those of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Les Golden's novel is a triumph begging for adaptation to the screen."- LANA WOOD, Film and T.V. Producer, Actress ("Diamonds Are Forever") Best-selling Author, Natalie, a Memoir "Les Golden has an ever-increasing influence and burgeoning popularity.A significant name in the industry, the 'go to' man for strategy and anecdotal literarydexterity. I cannot acclaim his star highly enough."- JAMES MCKEOWN, Editor, iGaming Business Magazine and Gambling.com Magazine "Les Golden is a comedy genius. It really is as simple as that. An expert in the field,he makes getting educated not only painless but actually funny."- DAVE BLAND, Editor, Flush Magazine, British television pundit "I learn more about strategy through Les' writings than I do through many failed tripsto Vegas. Always concise, easy-to-read, and intelligent."- JON YOUNG, Editor WPT (World Poker Tour) Magazine "Les Golden makes numbers hilarious. He's simply the funniest gaming strategy writer there is. His writing is 'rakish' and 'bond-esque.' "- PHILIP CONNELLER, Editor, Bluff Europe Magazine "The dialog crackles and the fictional elements brilliantly illuminate how cool Ed Thorp is. And there's just the right amount of blackjack and math. I love it."- AARON BROWN, Professional gambler, Wall Street risk managerAuthor, The Poker Face of Wall Street

This book covers the modelling of human behaviour in the education and labour markets, which due to their interdependency are viewed as one system. Important factors influencing the decision-making of individuals and firms in this system are discussed. The role of social environment and networks is stressed. The approach of agent-based modelling is presented and compared with standard economic modelling and other simulation techniques in the context of modelling complex adaptive systems. Practical questions in building agent-based models of labour-education market system with social networks are discussed. These questions include modelling the structure of education system and agent behaviour there; modelling and calibrating the labour market without and with firms; generating the social network, defining its behaviour and calibrating it; and embedding the resulting system into a larger model.

Game theory is central to understanding human behavior and relevant to all of the behavioral sciences--from biology and economics, to anthropology and political science. However, as "The Bounds of Reason" demonstrates, game theory alone cannot fully explain human behavior and should instead complement other key concepts championed by the behavioral disciplines. Herbert Gintis shows that just as game theory without broader social theory is merely technical bravado, so social theory without game theory is a handicapped enterprise. This edition has been thoroughly revised and updated.

Reinvigorating game theory, "The Bounds of Reason" offers innovative thinking for the behavioral sciences.

Over the last 25 years, evolutionary game theory has grown with theoretical contributions from the disciplines of mathematics, economics, computer science and biology. It is now ripe for applications. In this book, Daniel Friedman--an economist trained in mathematics--and Barry Sinervo--a biologist trained in mathematics--offer the first unified account of evolutionary game theory aimed at applied researchers. They show how to use a single set of tools to build useful models for three different worlds: the natural world studied by biologists; the social world studied by anthropologists, economists, political scientists and others; and the virtual world built by computer scientists and engineers. The first six chapters offer an accessible introduction to core concepts of evolutionary game theory. These include fitness, replicator dynamics, sexual dynamics, memes and genes, single and multiple population games, Nash equilibrium and evolutionarily stable states, noisy best response and other adaptive processes, the Price equation, and cellular automata. The material connects evolutionary game theory with classic population genetic models, and also with classical game theory. Notably, these chapters also show how to estimate payoff and choice parameters from the data. The last eight chapters present exemplary game theory applications. These include a new coevolutionary predator-prey learning model extending rock-paper-scissors; models that use human subject laboratory data to estimate learning dynamics; new approaches to plastic strategies and life cycle strategies, including estimates for male elephant seals; a comparison of machine learning techniques for preserving diversity to those seen in the natural world; analyses of congestion in traffic networks (either internet or highways) and the "price of anarchy "; environmental and trade policy analysis based on evolutionary games; the evolution of cooperation; and speciation. As an aid for instruction, a web site provides downloadable computational tools written in the R programming language, Matlab, Mathematica and Excel.

This second edition expands the first chapters, which focus on the approach to risk management issues discussed in the first edition, to offer readers a better understanding of the risk management process and the relevant quantitative phases. In the following chapters the book examines life insurance, non-life insurance and pension plans, presenting the technical and financial aspects of risk transfers and insurance without the use of complex mathematical tools. The book is written in a comprehensible style making it easily accessible to advanced undergraduate and graduate students in Economics, Business and Finance, as well as undergraduate students in Mathematics who intend starting on an actuarial qualification path. With the systematic inclusion of practical topics, professionals will find this text useful when working in insurance and pension related areas, where investments, risk analysis and financial reporting play a major role.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Decision and Game Theory for Security, GameSec 2015, held in London, UK, in November 2015. The 16 revised full papers presented together with 5 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 37 submissions. Game and decision theory has emerged as a valuable systematic framework with powerful analytical tools in dealing with the intricacies involved in making sound and sensible security decisions. For instance, game theory provides methodical approaches to account for interdependencies of security decisions, the role of hidden and asymmetric information, the perception of risks and costs in human behaviour, the incentives/limitations of the attackers, and much more. Combined with our classical approach to computer and network security, and drawing from various fields such as economic, social and behavioural sciences, game and decision theory is playing a fundamental role in the development of the pillars of the "science of security".

This title links two of the most dominant research streams in philosophy of logic, namely game theory and proof theory. As the work's subtitle expresses, the authors will build this link by means of the dialogical approach to logic. One important aspect of the present study is that the authors restrict themselves to the logically valid fragment of Constructive Type Theory (CTT). The reason is that, once that fragment is achieved the result can be extended to cover the whole CTT system. The first chapters in the brief offer overviews on the two frameworks discussed in the book with an emphasis on the dialogical framework. The third chapter demonstrates the left-to-right direction of the equivalence result. This is followed by a chapter that demonstrates the use of the algorithm in showing how to transform a specific winning strategy into a CCT-demonstration of the axiom of choice. The fifth chapter develops the algorithm from CTT-demonstrations to dialogical strategies. This brief concludes by introducing elements of discussion which are to be developed in subsequent work.

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.

This is the first comprehensive monograph on the mathematical theory of the solitaire game "The Tower of Hanoi" which was invented in the 19th century by the French number theorist Edouard Lucas. The book comprises a survey of the historical development from the game's predecessors up to recent research in mathematics and applications in computer science and psychology. Apart from long-standing myths it contains a thorough, largely self-contained presentation of the essential mathematical facts with complete proofs, including also unpublished material. The main objects of research today are the so-called Hanoi graphs and the related Sierpinski graphs. Acknowledging the great popularity of the topic in computer science, algorithms and their correctness proofs form an essential part of the book. In view of the most important practical applications of the Tower of Hanoi and its variants, namely in physics, network theory, and cognitive (neuro)psychology, other related structures and puzzles like, e.g., the "Tower of London", are addressed. Numerous captivating integer sequences arise along the way, but also many open questions impose themselves. Central among these is the famed Frame-Stewart conjecture. Despite many attempts to decide it and large-scale numerical experiments supporting its truth, it remains unsettled after more than 70 years and thus demonstrates the timeliness of the topic. Enriched with elaborate illustrations, connections to other puzzles and challenges for the reader in the form of (solved) exercises as well as problems for further exploration, this book is enjoyable reading for students, educators, game enthusiasts and researchers alike.

Social computing is concerned with the study of social behavior and social c- text based on computational systems. Behavioral modeling reproduces the social behavior, and allows for experimenting, scenario planning, and deep understa- ing of behavior, patterns, and potential outcomes. The pervasive use of computer and Internet technologies provides an unprecedented environment of various - cial activities. Social computing facilitates behavioral modeling in model building, analysis, pattern mining, and prediction. Numerous interdisciplinary and inter- pendent systems are created and used to represent the various social and physical systems for investigating the interactions between groups, communities, or nati- states. This requires joint efforts to take advantage of the state-of-the-art research from multiple disciplines, social computing, and behavioral modeling in order to document lessons learned and develop novel theories, experiments, and methodo- gies in terms of social, physical, psychological, and governmental mechanisms. The goal is to enable us to experiment, create, and recreate an operational environment with a better understanding of the contributions from each individual discipline, forging joint interdisciplinary efforts. This is the second international workshop on Social Computing, Behavioral ModelingandPrediction. The submissions were from Asia, Australia, Europe, and America. Since SBP09 is a single-track workshop, we could not accept all the good submissions. The accepted papers cover a wide range of interesting topics.

For decades, casino gaming has been steadily increasing in popularity worldwide. Blackjack is among the most popular of the casino table games, one where astute choices of playing strategy can create an advantage for the player. RISK AND REWARD analyzes the game in depth, pinpointing not just its optimal strategies but also its financial performance, in terms of both expected cash flow and associated risk. The book begins by describing the strategies and their performance in a clear, straightforward style. The presentation is self-contained, non-mathematical, and accessible to readers at all levels of playing skill, from the novice to the blackjack expert. Careful attention is also given to simplified, but still nearly optimal strategies that are easier to use in a casino. Unlike other books in the literature the author then derives each aspect of the strategy mathematically, to justify its claim to optimality. The derivations mostly use algebra and calculus, although some require more advanced analysis detailed in supporting appendices. For easy comprehension, formulae are translated into tables and graphs through extensive computation. This book will appeal to everyone interested in blackjack: those with mathematical training intrigued by its application to this popular game as well as all players seeking to improve their performance.

Steps forward in mathematics often reverberate in other scientific disciplines, and give rise to innovative conceptual developments or find surprising technological applications. This volume brings to the forefront some of the proponents of the mathematics of the twentieth century, who have put at our disposal new and powerful instruments for investigating the reality around us. The portraits present people who have impressive charisma and wide-ranging cultural interests, who are passionate about defending the importance of their own research, are sensitive to beauty, and attentive to the social and political problems of their times. What we have sought to document is mathematics' central position in the culture of our day. Space has been made not only for the great mathematicians but also for literary texts, including contributions by two apparent interlopers, Robert Musil and Raymond Queneau, for whom mathematical concepts represented a valuable tool for resolving the struggle between 'soul and precision.'

This book describes the latest advances in the theory of mean field games, which are optimal control problems with a continuum of players, each of them interacting with the whole statistical distribution of a population. While it originated in economics, this theory now has applications in areas as diverse as mathematical finance, crowd phenomena, epidemiology, and cybersecurity. Because mean field games concern the interactions of infinitely many players in an optimal control framework, one expects them to appear as the limit for Nash equilibria of differential games with finitely many players as the number of players tends to infinity. This book rigorously establishes this convergence, which has been an open problem until now. The limit of the system associated with differential games with finitely many players is described by the so-called master equation, a nonlocal transport equation in the space of measures. After defining a suitable notion of differentiability in the space of measures, the authors provide a complete self-contained analysis of the master equation. Their analysis includes the case of common noise problems in which all the players are affected by a common Brownian motion. They then go on to explain how to use the master equation to prove the mean field limit. This groundbreaking book presents two important new results in mean field games that contribute to a unified theoretical framework for this exciting and fast-developing area of mathematics.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the Joint INFORMS-GDN and EWG-DSS International Conference on Group Decision and Negotiation (GDN), held in Toulouse, France, during June 10 13, 2014.

The GDN meetings aim to bring together researchers and practitioners from a wide spectrum of fields, including economics, management, computer science, engineering and decision science. The contributions report on research on individual and group decision support, negotiation and auction support and the design of systems and agents supporting such processes.

From a total of 88 submissions, 31 papers were accepted for publication in this volume. The papers are organized into topical sections on collaborative decision making, auctions, knowledge decision support systems, multi-criteria decision making, multi-agent systems, negotiation analysis, preference analysis, data analysis, DSS / GDSS use, network analysisand semantic tools for group decision making."

This is a book on the basics of mathematics and computation and their uses in economics for modern day students and practitioners. The reader is introduced to the basics of numerical analysis as well as the use of computer programs such as Matlab and Excel in carrying out involved computations. Sections are devoted to the use of Maple in mathematical analysis. Examples drawn from recent contributions to economic theory and econometrics as well as a variety of end of chapter exercises help to illustrate and apply the presented concepts.

This textbook invites the reader to develop a holistic grounding in mathematical finance, where concepts and intuition play as important a role as powerful mathematical tools. Financial interactions are characterized by a vast amount of data and uncertainty; navigating the inherent dangers and hidden opportunities requires a keen understanding of what techniques to apply and when. By exploring the conceptual foundations of options pricing, the author equips readers to choose their tools with a critical eye and adapt to emerging challenges. Introducing the basics of gambles through realistic scenarios, the text goes on to build the core financial techniques of Puts, Calls, hedging, and arbitrage. Chapters on modeling and probability lead into the centerpiece: the Black-Scholes equation. Omitting the mechanics of solving Black-Scholes itself, the presentation instead focuses on an in-depth analysis of its derivation and solutions. Advanced topics that follow include the Greeks, American options, and embellishments. Throughout, the author presents topics in an engaging conversational style. "Intuition breaks" frequently prompt students to set aside mathematical details and think critically about the relevance of tools in context. Mathematics of Finance is ideal for undergraduates from a variety of backgrounds, including mathematics, economics, statistics, data science, and computer science. Students should have experience with the standard calculus sequence, as well as a familiarity with differential equations and probability. No financial expertise is assumed of student or instructor; in fact, the text's deep connection to mathematical ideas makes it suitable for a math capstone course. A complete set of the author's lecture videos is available on YouTube, providing a comprehensive supplementary resource for a course or independent study.

A lot of economic problems can be formulated as constrained optimizations and equilibration of their solutions. Various mathematical theories have been supplying economists with indispensable machineries for these problems arising in economic theory. Conversely, mathematicians have been stimulated by various mathematical difficulties raised by economic theories. The series is designed to bring together those mathematicians who are seriously interested in getting new challenging stimuli from economic theories with those economists who are seeking effective mathematical tools for their research.

A major problem arising in airline alliances is to design allocation mechanisms determining how the revenue of a product should be shared among the airlines. The nucleolus is a concept of cooperative game theory that provides solutions for allocating the cost or benefit of a cooperation. This work provides fair revenue proportions for the airline alliances based on the nucleolus, which assumes a centralized decision making system. The proposed mechanism is used as a benchmark to evaluate the fairness of the revenue sharing mechanisms, where the alliance partners behave selfishly. Additionally, a new selfish revenue allocation rule is developed that improves the performance of the existing methods.

The field of artificial economics (AE) embraces a broad range of methodologies relying on computer simulations in order to model and study the complexity of economic and social phenomena. The overarching principle of AE is the analysis of aggregate properties of artificial economies populated by adaptive agents that are equipped with behavioural rules and specific individual targets. These aggregate properties are neither foreseen nor intended by the artificial agents; conversely they are emerging characteristics of such artificially simulated systems. The book presents a peer-reviewed collection of papers addressing a variety of issues related to macroeconomics, industrial organization, networks, management and finance, as well as purely methodological issues.

Groups of people perform acts that are subject to standards of rationality. A committee may sensibly award fellowships, or may irrationally award them in violation of its own policies. A theory of collective rationality defines collective acts that are evaluable for rationality and formulates principles for their evaluation. This book argues that a group's act is evaluable for rationality if it is the products of acts its members fully control. It also argues that such an act is collectively rational if the acts of the group's members are rational. Efficiency is a goal of collective rationality, but not a requirement, except in cases where conditions are ideal for joint action and agents have rationally prepared for joint action. The people engaged in a game of strategy form a group, and the combination of their acts yields a collective act. If their collective act is rational, it constitutes a solution to their game. A theory of collective rationality yields principles concerning solutions to games. One principle requires that a solution constitute an equilibrium among the incentives of the agents in the game. In a cooperative game some agents are coalitions of individuals, and it may be impossible for all agents to pursue all incentives. Because rationality is attainable, the appropriate equilibrium standard for cooperative games requires that agents pursue only incentives that provide sufficient reasons to act. The book's theory of collective rationality supports an attainable equilibrium-standard for solutions to cooperative games and shows that its realization follows from individuals' rational acts. By extending the theory of rationality to groups, this book reveals the characteristics that make an act evaluable for rationality and the way rationality's evaluation of an act responds to the type of control its agent exercises over the act. The book's theory of collective rationality contributes to philosophical projects such as contractarian ethics and to practical projects such as the design of social institutions.

A collection of papers dealing with a broad range of topics in mathematical economics, game theory and economic dynamics. The contributions present both theoretical and applied research. The volume is dedicated to Mordecai Kurz. The papers were presented in a special symposium co-hosted by the Stanford University Department of Economics and by the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research in August 2002.

Many relationships in economics, and also in other fields, are both dynamic and nonlinear. A major advance in econometrics over the last fifteen years has been the development of a theory of estimation and inference for dy namic nonlinear models. This advance was accompanied by improvements in computer technology that facilitate the practical implementation of such estimation methods. In two articles in Econometric Reviews, i.e., Potscher and Prucha {1991a, b), we provided -an expository discussion of the basic structure of the asymptotic theory of M-estimators in dynamic nonlinear models and a review of the literature up to the beginning of this decade. Among others, the class of M-estimators contains least mean distance estimators (includ ing maximum likelihood estimators) and generalized method of moment estimators. The present book expands and revises the discussion in those articles. It is geared towards the professional econometrician or statistician. Besides reviewing the literature we also presented in the above men tioned articles a number of then new results. One example is a consis tency result for the case where the identifiable uniqueness condition fails."

"Colin Camerer's "Behavioral Game Theory" fills an important niche in the literature. It brings together and synthesizes a large body of experimental and theoretical work on multi-person interactions, in psychology as well as economics. The result is a theory of games enriched by empirical knowledge and significantly closer to what is needed for applications. Camerer's book will make an outstanding principal or supplementary text for graduate or advanced undergraduate courses in game theory and experimental economics."--Vincent Crawford, University of California, San Diego

"Behavioral economics has become very popular and of growing interest both within economics and in social science more generally. It integrates the rational maximizing behavior characteristic of economic models with objectives and beliefs characteristic of sociology and psychology in new and useful ways. Thus, it is increasingly relevant in framing issues such as tax policy, income redistribution, auctions, crime, and drug addiction. In this excellent and welcome work, "Behavioral Game Theory," Colin Camerer brings his impressive breadth of knowledge to bear on the behavioral economics of strategic interaction, and thus on the field itself. This book will induce scholars, graduate students, and young social scientists alike to work in this burgeoning and exciting area of intellectual pursuit."--Herbert Gintis, University of Massachusetts and the Santa Fe Institute

"Colin Camerer's "Behavioral Game Theory" is a major achievement. Nothing like it is available thus far, and the author is uniquely qualified to have written it. He has an impressive understanding of both psychology and economics. He has taken thetrouble to 'talk through' hundreds of tricky arguments that elsewhere just get stated mathematically. Rarer still is his positive attitude toward modeling, experimentation, econometrics, and other methodologies. If his book invests others with the same open-minded, synergistic outlook, that alone would make it worthwhile."--David G. Pearce, Yale University

"This is a terrific book. I cannot recommend it highly enough. In addition to its substantive findings, it contains a wealth of wise methodological insights, generously sprinkled with relevant and stimulating anecdotes."--Jon Elster, Columbia University

"Behavioral economics has won whatever intellectual war was fought. It has won in the sense that it has been shown to be superior to the conventional alternatives wherever there has been an evidentiary contest. In a deeper sense, however, there was no war-simply standard science, in which the current generation of scholars builds on and expands the work of previous generations. The work of implementing these advances has only begun. This book explains the nature of the advances to those in economics who were locked away in their workshops while the intellectual contest was being waged and may be unaware of what has happened."--Henry J. Aaron, The Brookings Institution

"It is certainly time that a book such as this be published. This volume will be a 'one-stop shop' for learning about behavioral economics and is likely to be adopted in graduate course in behavioral economics (and may even encourage people to offer such a course). The introductory chapter does a good job of explaining the enterprise, behavioral economics, and providing some history and context."--Linda Babcock, Carnegie Mellon University, coauthor of "Women Don't Ask"