This book addresses the perennial question of how to promote Africa's indigenous languages as medium of instruction in educational systems. Breaking with the traditional approach to the continent's language question by focusing on the often overlooked issue of the link between African languages and economic development, Language Policy and Economics argues that African languages are an integral part of a nation's socio-political and economic development. Therefore, the book argues that any language policy designed to promote these languages in such higher domains as the educational system in particular must have economic advantages if the intent is to succeed, and proposes Prestige Planning as the way to address this issue. The proposition is a welcome break away from language policies which pay lip-service to the empowerment of African languages while, by default, strengthening the stranglehold of imported European languages.

During the past 20 years, behavioral and social scientists following advances in physics and mathematics have shown an increasing interest in complex, adaptive, self-organizing, dynamic systems. The appeal of this perspective is fueled by the fact that there are a handful of properties that are common to all dynamic systems that can be used to explain the spontaneous emergence of novel forms, the mechanisms of continuity and change, and the dynamics of a large number of interacting factors. From animal population dynamics to human neural processes, there is growing evidence that human individual and social interactions may be understood as a dynamic system. In the field of psychology, there was a flurry of books during the early 1990s that explored the dynamic human system. These titles, and those that have been published since, fall into two general categories: those that integrate dynamic systems ideas into psychological theories and those that provide methods of modeling dynamic human systems (see list of competitive titles below).

Despite the enrichment that dynamic systems principles have afforded psychological theories, the methods provided to test these theoretical assumptions have not been readily adopted. The reason is that, unlike the physical scientists, social scientists are not as familiar with the mathematical formulations (i.e., differential and difference equations) required for these methods, nor are their data particularly amenable to such manipulations or models. Furthermore, the psychological relevance of some of the parameters extracted from these methods (i.e., Lyupanov exponents, chaotic attractors) is very difficult to interpret. What is needed is a methodological middle road to bridge theory and analysis. The proposed book on the state space grid method is perfectly poised to provide that bridge.

State space grids were first developed by Marc Lewis and colleagues (Lewis, Lamey, and Douglas, 1999) to depict sequences of infant attention and distress. This technique has since been applied to the study of parent-child interactions (Granic & Lamey, 2002; Granic, Hollenstein, Dishion, & Patterson, 2003; Hollenstein, Granic, Stoolmiller, & Snyder, 2005; Hollenstein & Lewis, under review; Lewis, Zimmerman, Hollenstein, & Lamey, 2004), and peer interactions (Dishion, Nelson, Bullock, & Winter, 2005; Martin, Fabes, Hanish, & Hollenstein, 2005). At this time, there are projects in progress that extend this work into the study of marital interactions, young adult group drinking patterns, eye gaze and eye contact in response to questioning, diary studies, and peer pressure dynamics.
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This book offers the first systematic analysis of economic thought concerning war. It retraces debates on war from the formation of European states, the rise of Mercantilism, to Colonialism, Imperialism, the World Wars and the Cold War. Allio shows different economic perspectives from which it is possible to study war as a tool to achieve economic ends: causes, consequences, costs, funding methods, and effects on the economic status of the state and on the well-being of citizens. Examining interpretations from Smith, Hobson, Keynes, Kalecki, Stiglitz and many more, this important volume addresses the economic implications of war from the perspectives of many who bore the costs of wars in reality.

Individuals, firms, governments and nations behave strategically, for good and bad. Over the last few decades, game theory has been constructed and progressively refined to become the major tool used by social scientists to understand, predict and regulate strategic interaction among agents who often have conflicting interests. In the surprisingly anodyne jargon of the theory, they play games . This book offers an introduction to the basic tools of game theory and an overview of a number of applications to real-world cases, covering the areas of economics, politics and international relations. Each chapter is accompanied by some suggestions about further reading.

The rise of game theory has made bargaining one of the core issues in economic theory. Written at a theoretical and conceptual level, the book develops a framework for the analysis of bargaining processes. The framework focuses on the dynamic of the bargaining process, which is in contrast to much previous theoretical work on the subject, and most notably to the approaches stemming from game theory. Chapters include: * Decision-Making and Expectations in Theories of Bargaining * Decision-Making and Expectations in a Game Theory Model * Limitations of the Environment Concept * Game Theory as a Basis for a Theory of Bargaining * The Decision/Expectation/adjustment Approach * The Adjustment Process * Direct Interdependence and the Consistency of Decisions

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.

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 both summarizes the basic theory of evolutionary games and explains their developing applications, giving special attention to the 2-player, 2-strategy game. This game, usually termed a "2x2 game" in the jargon, has been deemed most important because it makes it possible to posit an archetype framework that can be extended to various applications for engineering, the social sciences, and even pure science fields spanning theoretical biology, physics, economics, politics, and information science. The 2x2 game is in fact one of the hottest issues in the field of statistical physics. The book first shows how the fundamental theory of the 2x2 game, based on so-called replicator dynamics, highlights its potential relation with nonlinear dynamical systems. This analytical approach implies that there is a gap between theoretical and reality-based prognoses observed in social systems of humans as well as in those of animal species. The book explains that this perceived gap is the result of an underlying reciprocity mechanism called social viscosity. As a second major point, the book puts a sharp focus on network reciprocity, one of the five fundamental mechanisms for adding social viscosity to a system and one that has been a great concern for study by statistical physicists in the past decade. The book explains how network reciprocity works for emerging cooperation, and readers can clearly understand the existence of substantial mechanics when the term "network reciprocity" is used. In the latter part of the book, readers will find several interesting examples in which evolutionary game theory is applied. One such example is traffic flow analysis. Traffic flow is one of the subjects that fluid dynamics can deal with, although flowing objects do not comprise a pure fluid but, rather, are a set of many particles. Applying the framework of evolutionary games to realistic traffic flows, the book reveals that social dilemma structures lie behind traffic flow.

This book is focused on the discussion of the traffic assignment problem, the mathematical and practical meaning of variables, functions and basic principles. This work gives information about new approaches, methods and algorithms based on original methodological technique, developed by authors in their publications for the past several years, as well as corresponding prospective implementations. The book may be of interest to a wide range of readers, such as civil engineering students, traffic engineers, developers of traffic assignment algorithms etc. The obtained results here are to be used in both practice and theory. This book is devoted to the traffic assignment problem, formulated in a form of nonlinear optimization program. The most efficient solution algorithms related to the problem are based on its structural features and practical meaning rather than on standard nonlinear optimization techniques or approaches. The authors have carefully considered the meaning of the traffic assignment problem for efficient algorithms development.

This textbook presents worked-out exercises on game theory with detailed step-by-step explanations. While most textbooks on game theory focus on theoretical results, this book focuses on providing practical examples in which students can learn to systematically apply theoretical solution concepts to different fields of economics and business. The text initially presents games that are required in most courses at the undergraduate level and gradually advances to more challenging games appropriate for graduate level courses. The first six chapters cover complete-information games, separately analyzing simultaneous-move and sequential-move games, with applications in industrial economics, law, and regulation. Subsequent chapters dedicate special attention to incomplete information games, such as signaling games, cheap talk games, and equilibrium refinements, emphasizing common steps and including graphical illustrations to focus students' attention on the most relevant payoff comparisons at each point of the analysis. In addition, exercises are ranked according to their difficulty, with a letter (A-C) next to the exercise number. This allows students to pace their studies and instructors to structure their classes accordingly. By providing detailed worked-out examples, this text gives students at various levels the tools they need to apply the tenets of game theory in many fields of business and economics. The second edition of the text has been revised to provide additional exercises at the introductory and intermediate level, expanding the scope of the book to be appropriate for upper undergraduate students looking to improve their understanding of the subject. The second edition also includes a new chapter devoted entirely to cheap talk games. Revised to appeal to a larger audience of instructors and students, this text is appropriate for introductory-to-intermediate courses in game theory at the upper undergraduate and graduate levels.

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.

Das im heutigen Berufsalltag so wichtige und allgegenwartige "treffsichere Umgehen" mit mathematischen Methoden und Modellen setzt voraus, dass Studierende die relevanten Werkzeuge kennen und verstehen, sie auswahlen und anwenden sowie erzielte Ergebnis (auf Plausibilitat) prufen, bewerten und je nach Bedarf auf andere Fragestellungen transferieren bzw. zum Problemloesen einsetzen koennen. Ausgehend von der Schulmathematik vermitteln die Autoren dem Leser diese berufsrelevanten Fertigkeiten didaktisch hervorragend und gut zuganglich. Dabei ist jedes Kapitel neben vielen Aufgaben mit Loesungen mit einem Eingangs- und einem Ausgangstest versehen, um eine effiziente Lernkontrolle zu ermoeglichen.

Game Theory and the Law is a collection of previously published articles in which ideas from game theory and the economics of asymmetric information are applied to legal issues. Game theory's method is to simplify a situation by describing it in terms of players, actions, payoffs, after which the players' strategic interactions can be described. Whether used explicitly or implicitly, this is a highly useful approach to law. This important volume collects together the classic articles on the subject together with surveys of the approach and illustrative examples of the use of game theory in law.

Many of today's most commercially successful videogames, from Call of Duty to Company of Heroes, are war-themed titles that play out in what are framed as authentic real-world settings inspired by recent news headlines or drawn from history. While such games are marketed as authentic representations of war, they often provide a selective form of realism that eschews problematic, yet salient aspects of war. In addition, changes in the way Western states wage and frame actual wars makes contemporary conflicts increasingly resemble videogames when perceived from the vantage point of Western audiences. This interdisciplinary volume brings together scholars from games studies, media and cultural studies, politics and international relations, and related fields to examine the complex relationships between military-themed videogames and real-world conflict, and to consider how videogames might deal with history, memory, and conflict in alternative ways. It asks: What is the role of videogames in the formation and negotiation of cultural memory of past wars? How do game narratives and designs position the gaming subject in relation to history, war and militarism? And how far do critical, anti-war/peace games offer an alternative or challenge to mainstream commercial titles?

In recent decades game theory - the mathematics of rational decision-making by interacting individuals - has assumed a central place in our understanding of capitalist markets, the evolution of social behavior in animals, and even the ethics of altruism and fairness in human beings. With game theory's ubiquity, however, has come a great deal of misunderstanding Critics of the contemporary social sciences view it as part of an unwelcome trend toward the marginalization of historicist and interpretive styles of inquiry, and many accuse its proponents of presenting a thin and empirically dubious view of human choice. The World the Game Theorists Made seeks to explain the ascendency of game theory, focusing on the poorly understood period between the publication of John von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern's seminal Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944 and the theory's revival in economics in the 1980s. Drawing on a diverse collection of institutional archives, personal correspondence and papers, and interviews, Paul Erickson shows how game theory offered social scientists, biologists, military strategists, and others a common, flexible language that could facilitate wide-ranging thought and debate on some of the most critical issues of the day.

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.

Research from the neurosciences and behavioural sciences highlights the importance of individual differences in explaining human behaviour. Individual differences in core psychological constructs, such as intelligence or personality, account for meaningful variations in a vast range of responses and behaviours. Aspects of chess have been increasingly used in the past to evaluate a myriad of psychological theories, and several of these studies consider individual differences to be key constructs in their respective fields. This book summarizes the research surrounding the psychology of chess from an individual- differences perspective. The findings accumulated from nearly forty years' worth of research about chess and individual differences are brought together to show what is known - and still unknown - about the psychology of chess, with an emphasis on how people differ from one another.

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.

Gaming the Market: Applying Game Theory to Create Winning Trading Strategies is the first book to show investors how game theory is applicable to decisions about buying and selling stocks, bonds, mutual funds, futures, and options. As a practical trading guide, Gaming the Market will help investors master this revolutionary approach, and employ it to their advantage.

Although game theory has been studied since the 1940s, it has only recently been applied to the world of finance. Game theory champions garnered the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics, and, today, this theory is used to analyze everything from the baseball strike to FCC auctions. Increasingly, game theory is making its mark as a potent tool for traders. In Gaming the Market, economist Ronald B. Shelton provides a model that enables traders to predict profitability and, as a result, make effective buy and sell decisions.

Stated simply, game theory is the study of conflict based on a formal approach to decision making that views decisions as choices made in a game. Whether playing individually or in a group, each player in a conflict has more than one course of action available to him, and the outcome of the "game" depends on the interaction of the strategies pursued by each. Shelton offers real-world examples that reveal how the principles of game theory drive financial markets --and how these same principles can be used to develop winning investment strategies. Through Shelton's organized and precise explanations--he uses familiar games such as chess and checkers to illustrate his points --readers gain a solid understanding of the key principles of game theory before applying them to actual financial market situations.

Gaming the Market examines the interaction between price fluctuations and risk acceptance levels and gradually constructs a game theory model which proves that there are probability-based formulas for determining the profitability of any given trade.

With appendixes on T-Bond futures, mathematical representations of the model, and QuickBasic code for calculating relative frequencies, Gaming the Market provides a thorough overview of the rules and strategies of game theory. This indispensable reference will prove invaluable to novice and seasoned players alike.

Are the markets a game? What are the rules? Who are the players?

How can you, as a player, come up with a winning strategy?

Now, acclaimed economist Ronald B. Shelton shows you how to master the power of game theory in the first trader's guide to this revolutionary approach to investment decisions!

"It's not often that a refreshingly new idea appears in the field of trading strategies or risk management, but Ronald B. Shelton has taken pieces from game theory and betting strategies and transformed them into a new, visual way to make trading decisions. . . . He has been able to put a value on trading situations which can increase your ability to manage risk as well as clarify expectations --both essential ingredients for success." --from the Foreword by Perry Kaufman author of The New Commodity Trading Systems and Methods.

"Gaming the Market is a very welcome and most useful new guide to playing profitably in the biggest and most complex game ever devised -- speculating in the financial markets. Investors and traders who study this book will gain valuable insights into the real nature of the markets and willlearn how to play the game to win." --Thomas A. Bierovic, President, Synergy Futures.

"Ronald B. Shelton has extended the field of excursion analysis with an innovative and provocative book that is sure to be widely read--and controversial. By examining the actual distributions of price excursion, he shows a technique to estimate your odds going in on a new position, and within the context of game theory, how to evaluate those chances. All traders and analysts seeking objective bases for trading will want to read this book." --John Sweeney, Technical Editor, Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities magazine.

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.

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.

Stochastic games have an element of chance: the state of the next round is determined probabilistically depending upon players' actions and the current state. Successful players need to balance the need for short-term payoffs while ensuring future opportunities remain high. The various techniques needed to analyze these often highly non-trivial games are a showcase of attractive mathematics, including methods from probability, differential equations, algebra, and combinatorics. This book presents a course on the theory of stochastic games going from the basics through to topics of modern research, focusing on conceptual clarity over complete generality. Each of its chapters introduces a new mathematical tool - including contracting mappings, semi-algebraic sets, infinite orbits, and Ramsey's theorem, among others - before discussing the game-theoretic results they can be used to obtain. The author assumes no more than a basic undergraduate curriculum and illustrates the theory with numerous examples and exercises, with solutions available online.

Stochastic games have an element of chance: the state of the next round is determined probabilistically depending upon players' actions and the current state. Successful players need to balance the need for short-term payoffs while ensuring future opportunities remain high. The various techniques needed to analyze these often highly non-trivial games are a showcase of attractive mathematics, including methods from probability, differential equations, algebra, and combinatorics. This book presents a course on the theory of stochastic games going from the basics through to topics of modern research, focusing on conceptual clarity over complete generality. Each of its chapters introduces a new mathematical tool - including contracting mappings, semi-algebraic sets, infinite orbits, and Ramsey's theorem, among others - before discussing the game-theoretic results they can be used to obtain. The author assumes no more than a basic undergraduate curriculum and illustrates the theory with numerous examples and exercises, with solutions available online.

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.

This book presents mathematical models and numerical simulations of crowd dynamics. The core topic is the development of a new multiscale paradigm, which bridges the microscopic and macroscopic scales taking the most from each of them for capturing the relevant clues of complexity of crowds. The background idea is indeed that most of the complex trends exhibited by crowds are due to an intrinsic interplay between individual and collective behaviors. The modeling approach promoted in this book pursues actively this intuition and profits from it for designing general mathematical structures susceptible of application also in fields different from the inspiring original one. The book considers also the two most traditional points of view: the microscopic one, in which pedestrians are tracked individually and the macroscopic one, in which pedestrians are assimilated to a continuum. Selected existing models are critically analyzed. The work is addressed to researchers and graduate students.