Praised by "Entertainment Weekly" as "the man who put the fizz into physics," Dr. Len Fisher turns his attention to the science of cooperation in his lively and thought-provoking book. Fisher shows how the modern science of game theory has helped biologists to understand the evolution of cooperation in nature, and investigates how we might apply those lessons to our own society. In a series of experiments that take him from the polite confines of an English dinner party to crowded supermarkets, congested Indian roads, and the wilds of outback Australia, not to mention baseball strategies and the intricacies of quantum mechanics, Fisher sheds light on the problem of global cooperation. The outcomes are sometimes hilarious, sometimes alarming, but always revealing. A witty romp through a serious science, "Rock, Paper, Scissors" will both teach and delight anyone interested in what it what it takes to get people to work together.

Dynamic optimization is rocket science and more. This volume teaches how to harness the modern theory of dynamic optimization to solve practical problems, not only from space flight but also in emerging social applications such as the control of drugs, corruption, and terror. These innovative domains are usefully thought about in terms of populations, incentives, and interventions, concepts which map well into the framework of optimal dynamic control. This volume is designed to be a lively introduction to the mathematics and a bridge to these hot topics in the economics of crime for current scholars. We celebrate Pontryagin s Maximum Principle that crowning intellectual achievement of human understanding and push its frontiers by exploring models that display multiple equilibria whose basins of attraction are separated by higher-dimensional DNSS "tipping points." That rich theory is complemented by numerical methods available through a companion web site."

This book describes highly applicable mathematics without using calculus or limits in general. The study agrees with the opinion that the traditional calculus/analysis is not necessarily the only proper grounding for academics who wish to apply mathematics. The choice of topics is based on a desire to present those facets of mathematics which will be useful to economists and social/behavioral scientists. The volume is divided into seven chapters. Chapter I presents a brief review of the solution of systems of linear equations by the use of matrices. Chapter III introduces the theory of probability. The rest of the book deals with new developments in mathematics such as linear and dynamic programming, the theory of networks and the theory of games. These developments are generally recognized as the most important field in the new mathematics' and they also have specific applications in the management sciences.

This book presents a survey of the aspects of economic complexity, with a focus on foundational, interdisciplinary ideas. The long-awaited follow up to his 2011 volume Complex Evolutionary Dynamics in Urban-Regional and Ecologic-Economic Systems: From Catastrophe to Chaos and Beyond, this volume draws together the threads of Rosser's earlier work on complexity theory and its wide applications in economics and an expanded list of related disciplines. The book begins with a full account of the broader categories of complexity in economics--dynamic, computational, hierarchical, and structural--before shifting to more detailed analysis. The next two chapters address problems associated with computational complexity, especially those of computability, and discuss the Godel Incompleteness Theorem with a focus on reflexivity. The middle chapters discuss the relationship between entropy, econophysics, evolution, and economic complexity, respectively, with applications in urban and regional dynamics, ecological economics, general equilibrium theory, as well as financial market dynamics. The final chapter works to bring together these themes into a broader framework and expose some of the limits concerning analysis of deeper foundational issues. With applications in all disciplines characterized by interconnected nonlinear adaptive systems, this book is appropriate for graduate students, professors and practitioners in economics and related disciplines such as regional science, mathematics, physics, biology, environmental sciences, philosophy, and psychology.

The financial market melt-down of the years 2007-2009 has posed great challenges for studies on financial economics. This financial economics text focuses on the dynamic interaction of financial markets and economic activity. The financial market to be studied here encompasses the money and bond market, credit market, stock market and foreign exchange market; economic activity includes the actions and interactions of firms, banks, households, governments and countries. The book shows how economic activity affects asset prices and the financial market, and how asset prices and financial market volatility and crises impact economic activity. The book offers extensive coverage of new and advanced topics in financial economics such as the term structure of interest rates, credit derivatives and credit risk, domestic and international portfolio theory, multi-agent and evolutionary approaches, capital asset pricing beyond consumption-based models, and dynamic portfolio decisions. Moreover a completely new section of the book is dedicated to the recent financial market meltdown of the years 2007-2009. Emphasis is placed on empirical evidence relating to episodes of financial instability and financial crises in the U.S. and in Latin American, Asian and Euro-area countries. Overall, the book explains what researchers and practitioners in the financial sector need to know about the financial-real interaction, and what practitioners and policy makers need to know about the financial market.

This book analyzes the following four distinct, although not dissimilar, areas of social choice theory and welfare economics: nonstrategic choice, Harsanyi's aggregation theorems, distributional ethics and strategic choice. While for aggregation of individual ranking of social states, whether the persons behave strategically or non-strategically, the decision making takes place under complete certainty; in the Harsanyi framework uncertainty has a significant role in the decision making process. Another ingenious characteristic of the book is the discussion of ethical approaches to evaluation of inequality arising from unequal distributions of achievements in the different dimensions of human well-being. Given its wide coverage, combined with newly added materials, end-chapter problems and bibliographical notes, the book will be helpful material for students and researchers interested in this frontline area research. Its lucid exposition, along with non-technical and graphical illustration of the concepts, use of numerical examples, makes the book a useful text.

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.

John von Neumann invented the digital computer, played a key role in the development of the atom bomb, constructed a branch of mathematics known as game theory, and became a defender of a movement to bomb the Russians before they could bomb us. Now comes a biography of this controversial genius and an exploration of his greatest idea--one that nearly triggered a nuclear war in 1950. Photographs.

"Efficient breach" is one of the most discussed topics in the literature of law and economics. What remedy incentivizes the parties of a contract to perform contracts if and only if it is efficient? This book provides a new perception based on an in-depth analysis of the impact the market structure, asymmetry of information, and deviations from the rational choice model have, comprehensively. The author compares the two predominant remedies for breach of contract which have been adopted by most jurisdictions and also found access to international conventions like the Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CiSG): Specific performance and expectation damages. The book illustrates the complexity such a comparison has under more realistic assumptions. The author shows that no simple answer is possible, but one needs to account for the circumstances. The comparison takes an economic approach to law applying game theory. The game-theoretic models are consistent throughout the entire book which makes it easy for the reader to understand what effects different assumptions about the market structure, the distribution of information, and deviations from the rational choice model have, and how they are intertwined.

Game theory is the science of interaction. This textbook, derived from courses taught by the author and developed over several years, is a comprehensive, straightforward introduction to the mathematics of non-cooperative games. It teaches what every game theorist should know: the important ideas and results on strategies, game trees, utility theory, imperfect information, and Nash equilibrium. The proofs of these results, in particular existence of an equilibrium via fixed points, and an elegant direct proof of the minimax theorem for zero-sum games, are presented in a self-contained, accessible way. This is complemented by chapters on combinatorial games like Go; and, it has introductions to algorithmic game theory, traffic games, and the geometry of two-player games. This detailed and lively text requires minimal mathematical background and includes many examples, exercises, and pictures. It is suitable for self-study or introductory courses in mathematics, computer science, or economics departments.

This book provides the fundamental theory of distributed optimization, game and learning. It includes those working directly in optimization,-and also many other issues like time-varying topology, communication delay, equality or inequality constraints,-and random projections. This book is meant for the researcher and engineer who uses distributed optimization, game and learning theory in fields like dynamic economic dispatch, demand response management and PHEV routing of smart grids.

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.

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.

This book comprises selected papers of the 25th International Conference on Difference Equations and Applications, ICDEA 2019, held at UCL, London, UK, in June 2019. The volume details the latest research on difference equations and discrete dynamical systems, and their application to areas such as biology, economics, and the social sciences. Some chapters have a tutorial style and cover the history and more recent developments for a particular topic, such as chaos, bifurcation theory, monotone dynamics, and global stability. Other chapters cover the latest personal research contributions of the author(s) in their particular area of expertise and range from the more technical articles on abstract systems to those that discuss the application of difference equations to real-world problems. The book is of interest to both Ph.D. students and researchers alike who wish to keep abreast of the latest developments in difference equations and discrete dynamical systems.

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.

In this concise book based on his Arne Ryde Lectures in 2002, Young suggests a conceptual framework for studying strategic learning and highlights theoretical developments in the area. He discusses the interactive learning problem; reinforcement and regret; equilibrium; conditional no-regret learning; prediction, postdiction, and calibration; fictitious play and its variants; Bayesian learning; and hypothesis testing. Young's framework emphasizes the amount of information required to implement different types of learning rules, criteria for evaluating their performance, and alternative notions of equilibrium to which they converge. He also stresses the limits of what can be achieved: for a given type of game and a given amount of information, there may exist no learning procedure that satisfies certain reasonable criteria of performance and convergence. In short, Young has provided a valuable primer that delineates what we know, what we would like to know, and the limits of what we can know, when we try to learn about a system that is composed of other learners.

This book provides a modern and comprehensive presentation of a wide variety of problems arising in nonlinear analysis, game theory, engineering, mathematical physics and contact mechanics. It includes recent achievements and puts them into the context of the existing literature. The volume is organized in four parts. Part I contains fundamental mathematical results concerning convex and locally Lipschits functions. Together with the Appendices, this foundational part establishes the self-contained character of the text. As the title suggests, in the following sections, both variational and topological methods are developed based on critical and fixed point results for nonsmooth functions. The authors employ these methods to handle the exemplary problems from game theory and engineering that are investigated in Part II, respectively Part III. Part IV is devoted to applications in contact mechanics. The book will be of interest to PhD students and researchers in applied mathematics as well as specialists working in nonsmooth analysis and engineering.

Joel Watson has refined his successful text to make it even more student-friendly. A number of sections have been added, and numerous chapters have been substantially revised. Dozens of new exercises have been added, along with solutions to selected exercises. Chapters are short and focused, with just the right amount of mathematical content and end-of-chapter exercises. New passages walk students through tricky topics.

This textbook looks at decisions - how we make them, and what makes them good or bad. In this bestselling introduction, Erik Angner clearly lays out the theory of behavioral economics and explains the intuitions behind it. The book offers a rich tapestry of examples, exercises, and problems drawn from fields such as economics, management, marketing, political science, and public policy. It shows how to apply the principles of behavioral economics to improve your life and work - and to make the world a better place to boot. No advanced mathematics is required. This is an ideal textbook for students coming to behavioral economics from various fields. It can be used on its own in introductory courses, or in combination with other texts at advanced undergraduate and postgraduate levels. It is equally suitable for general readers who have been captivated by popular-science books on behavioral economics and want to know more about this intriguing subject. New to this Edition: - An updated chapter on behavioral policy and the nudge agenda. - Several new sections, for example on the economics of happiness. - Updated examples and exercises, with an expanded answer key - Refreshed ancillary resources make for a plug and play experience for instructors teaching behavioral economics for the first time.

The goal of this book is to elaborate on the main principles of the theory of the Berge equilibrium by answering the following two questions: What are the basic properties of the Berge equilibrium? Does the Berge equilibrium exist, and how can it be calculated? The Golden Rule of ethics, which appears in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism and other world religions, states the following: "Behave towards others as you would like them to behave towards you." In any game, each party of conflict seeks to maximize some payoff. Therefore, for each player, the Golden Rule is implemented through the maximization of his/her payoff by all other players, which matches well with the concept of the Berge equilibrium. The approach presented here will be of particular interest to researchers (including undergraduates and graduates) and economists focused on decision-making under complex conflict conditions. The peaceful resolution of conflicts is the cornerstone of the approach: as a matter of fact, the Golden Rule precludes military clashes and violence. In turn, the new approach requires new methods; in particular, the existence problems are reduced to saddle point design for the Germeier convolution of payoff functions, with further transition to mixed strategies in accordance with the standard procedure employed by E. Borel, J. von Neumann, J. Nash, and their followers. Moreover, this new approach has proven to be efficient and fruitful with regard to a range of other important problems in mathematical game theory, which are considered in the Appendix.

A host of digital affordances, including reduced cost production tools, open distribution platforms, and ubiquitous connectivity, have engendered the growth of indie games among makers and users, forcing critics to reconsider the question of who makes games and why. Taking seriously this new mode of cultural produciton compells analysts to reconsider the blurred boundaries and relations of makers, users and texts as well as their respective relationship to cultural power and hierarchy. The contributions to Indie Games in the Digital Age consider these questions and examine a series of firms, makers, games and scenes, ranging from giants like Nintendo and Microsoft to grassroots games like Cards Against Humanity and Stardew Valley, to chart more precisely the productive and instructive disruption that this new site of cultural production offers.

This book discusses imaginary future generations and how current decision-making will influence those future generations. Markets and democracies focus on the present and therefore tend to make us forget that we are living in the present, with ancestors preceding and descendants succeeding us. Markets are excellent devices to equate supply and demand in the short term, but not for allocating resources between current and future generations, since future generations do not exist yet. Democracy is also not "applicable" for future generations, since citizens vote for candidates who will serve members of their, i.e., the current, generation. In order to overcome these shortcomings, the authors discusses imaginary future generations and future ministries in the context of current decision-making in fields such as the environment, urban management, forestry, water management, and finance. The idea of imaginary future generations comes from the Native American Iroquois, who had strong norms that compelled them to incorporate the interests of people seven generations ahead when making decisions.

Agent systems are being used to model complex systems like societies, markets and biological systems. In this book we investigate issues of agent systems related to convergence and interactivity using techniques from agent based modelling to simulate complex systems, and demonstrate that interactivity/exchange and convergence in multi-agent systems are issues that are significantly interrelated.

Topic and features: - Introduces the state of the art in multi-agent systems, with an emphasis on agent-based computational economics. - Sheds light on the fundamental concepts behind the stability of multi-agent systems. - Investigates knowledge exchange among agents, the rationale behind it and its effects on the ecosystem. - Explores how information provided through interaction with the system can be used to optimise its performance. - Describes a pricing strategy for a realistic large-scale distributed system.

This book supplies a comprehensive resource and will be invaluable reading for researchers and postgraduates studying this topic.

Electoral promises help to win votes and political candidates, or parties should strategically choose what they can deliver to win an election. Past game-theoretical studies tend to ignore electoral promises and this book sheds illuminating light on the functions and effects of electoral promises on policies or electoral outcomes through game theory models. This book provides a basic framework for game-theoretical analysis of electoral promises. The book also includes cases to illustrate real life applications of these theories.

This volume brings together the collected contributions of Dirk Bergemann and Juuso Valimaki, on the theme of learning, experimentation and intertemporal incentives, spanning over two decades of thought (1996 to 2019).The collection starts with a comprehensive introduction to the recent developments of dynamic mechanism design with a primary focus on the quasilinear case. The authors describe socially optimal and revenue optimal dynamic mechanism. They cover models of sequential screening and revenue maximizing auctions with dynamically changing bidder types, and also discuss models of information management where the mechanism designer can control (at least partially) the stochastic process governing the agent's types.Consolidating the research agenda on learning, experimentation, and dynamic mechanism design, which has been prominent in the area of economic theory, the authors present for the first time the main results of the research agenda in this volume.