This book surveys new algorithmic approaches and applications to natural and man-made disasters such as oil spills, hurricanes, earthquakes and wildfires. Based on the "Third International Conference on Dynamics of Disasters" held in Kalamata, Greece, July 2017, this Work includes contributions in evacuation logistics, disaster communications between first responders, disaster relief, and a case study on humanitarian logistics. Multi-disciplinary theories, tools, techniques and methodologies are linked with disasters from mitigation and preparedness to response and recovery. The interdisciplinary approach to problems in economics, optimization, 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.

This book provides a concise introduction to convex duality in financial mathematics. Convex duality plays an essential role in dealing with financial problems and involves maximizing concave utility functions and minimizing convex risk measures. Recently, convex and generalized convex dualities have shown to be crucial in the process of the dynamic hedging of contingent claims. Common underlying principles and connections between different perspectives are developed; results are illustrated through graphs and explained heuristically. This book can be used as a reference and is aimed toward graduate students, researchers and practitioners in mathematics, finance, economics, and optimization. Topics include: Markowitz portfolio theory, growth portfolio theory, fundamental theorem of asset pricing emphasizing the duality between utility optimization and pricing by martingale measures, risk measures and its dual representation, hedging and super-hedging and its relationship with linear programming duality and the duality relationship in dynamic hedging of contingent claims

Game theory has revolutionised our understanding of industrial organisation and the traditional theory of the firm. Despite these advances, industrial economists have tended to rely on a restricted set of tools from game theory, focusing on static and repeated games to analyse firm structure and behaviour. Luca Lambertini, a leading expert on the application of differential game theory to economics, argues that many dynamic phenomena in industrial organisation (such as monopoly, oligopoly, advertising, R&D races) can be better understood and analysed through the use of differential games. After illustrating the basic elements of the theory, Lambertini guides the reader through the main models, spanning from optimal control problems describing the behaviour of a monopolist through to oligopoly games in which firms' strategies include prices, quantities and investments. This approach will be of great value to students and researchers in economics and those interested in advanced applications of game theory.

Dynamic games continue to attract strong interest from researchers interested in modelling competitive as well as conflict situations exhibiting an intertemporel aspect. Applications of dynamic games have proven to be a suitable methodology to study the behaviour of players (decision-makers) and to predict the outcome of such situations in many areas including engineering, economics, management science, military, biology and political science.

Dynamic Games Theory and Applications collects thirteen articles written by established researchers. It is an excellent reference for researchers and graduate students covering a wide range of emerging and revisited problems in both cooperative and non-cooperative games in different areas of applications, especially in economics and management science.

This brief introduces game- and decision-theoretical techniques for the analysis and design of resilient interdependent networks. It unites game and decision theory with network science to lay a system-theoretical foundation for understanding the resiliency of interdependent and heterogeneous network systems. The authors pay particular attention to critical infrastructure systems, such as electric power, water, transportation, and communications. They discuss how infrastructure networks are becoming increasingly interconnected as the integration of Internet of Things devices, and how a single-point failure in one network can propagate to other infrastructures, creating an enormous social and economic impact. The specific topics in the book include: * static and dynamic meta-network resilience game analysis and design; * optimal control of interdependent epidemics spreading over complex networks; and * applications to secure and resilient design of critical infrastructures. These topics are supported by up-to-date summaries of the authors' recent research findings. The authors then discuss the future challenges and directions in the analysis and design of interdependent networks and explain the role of multi-disciplinary research has in computer science, engineering, public policy, and social sciences fields of study. The brief introduces new application areas in mathematics, economics, and system and control theory, and will be of interest to researchers and practitioners looking for new approaches to assess and mitigate risks in their systems and enhance their network resilience. A Game- and Decision-Theoretic Approach to Resilient Interdependent Network Analysis and Design also has self-contained chapters, which allows for multiple levels of reading by anyone with an interest in game and decision theory and network science.

In contrast to mainstream economics, complexity theory conceives the economy as a complex system of heterogeneous interacting agents characterised by limited information and bounded rationality. Agent Based Models (ABMs) are the analytical and computational tools developed by the proponents of this emerging methodology. Aimed at students and scholars of contemporary economics, this book includes a comprehensive toolkit for agent-based computational economics, now quickly becoming the new way to study evolving economic systems. Leading scholars in the field explain how ABMs can be applied fruitfully to many real-world economic examples and represent a great advancement over mainstream approaches. The essays discuss the methodological bases of agent-based approaches and demonstrate step-by-step how to build, simulate and analyse ABMs and how to validate their outputs empirically using the data. They also present a wide set of applications of these models to key economic topics, including the business cycle, labour markets, and economic growth.

This book considers and builds on the main propositions regarding body similarity and the principles of nature versus artifacts in science. It also explores the design (matrix) power of the human, Material/Machine, Money & Information (3M&I) body with respect to productivity/gross domestic product (GDP). The book begins in 2009 with Weiner's cybernetics and describes Matsui's theory and dynamism concerning the basic equation of W = ZL and artifact formulation using matrix methods, such as Matsui's matrix equation (Matsui's ME). In his book Fundamentals and Principles of Artifacts Science: 3M&I-Body System, published by Springer in 2016, the author championed the white-box approach for 3M&I artifacts in contrast to Simon's artificial approach from 1969. Two principles, the Sandwich (waist) and Balancing theories, and their fundamental problems, were identified. This book now proposes a third principle: the fractal/harmonic-like structure of the cosmos and life types in space and time. The book further elaborates on the complexity of the 3M&I system and management in terms of enterprises, economics, nature, and other applications. Also, the domain of nature versus artifacts is highlighted, demonstrating the possibility of a white-box cybernetics-type robot. This fosters the realization of humanized and harmonic worlds that combine increased happiness and social productivity in an age increasingly dominated by technology.

This book presents eleven classic papers by the late Professor Suzanne Scotchmer with introductions by leading economists and legal scholars. This book introduces Scotchmer's life and work; analyses her pioneering contributions to the economics of patents and innovation incentives, with a special focus on the modern theory of cumulative innovation; and describes her pioneering work on law and economics, evolutionary game theory, and general equilibrium/club theory. This book also provides a self-contained introduction to students who want to learn more about the various fields that Professor Scotchmer worked in, with a particular focus on patent incentives and cumulative innovation.

This book develops a machine-learning framework for predicting economic growth. It can also be considered as a primer for using machine learning (also known as data mining or data analytics) to answer economic questions. While machine learning itself is not a new idea, advances in computing technology combined with a dawning realization of its applicability to economic questions makes it a new tool for economists.

LEGOfied: Building Blocks as Media provides a multi-faceted exploration of LEGO fandom, addressing a blindspot in current accounts of LEGO and an emerging area of interest to media scholars: namely, the role of hobbyist enthusiasts and content producers in LEGO's emergence as a ubiquitous transmedia franchise. This book examines a range of LEGO hobbyism and their attendant forms of mediated self-expression and identity (their "technicities"): artists, aspiring Master Builders, collectors, and entrepreneurs who refashion LEGO bricks into new commodities (sets, tchotchkes, and minifigures). The practices and perspectives that constitute this diverse scene lie at the intersection of multiple transformations in contemporary culture, including the shifting relationships between culture industries and the audiences that form their most ardent consumer base, but also the emerging forms of entrepreneurialism, professionalization, and globalization that characterize the burgeoning DIY movement. What makes this a compelling project for media scholars is its mutli-dimensional articulation of how LEGO functions not just as a toy, cultural icon, or as transmedia franchise, but as a media platform. LEGOfied is centered around their shared experiences, qualitative observations, and semi-structured interviews at a number of LEGO hobbyist conventions. Working outwards from these conventions, each chapter engages additional modes of inquiry-media archaeology, aesthetics, posthumanist philosophy, feminist media studies, and science and technology studies-to explore the origins, permutations and implications of different aspects of the contemporary LEGO fandom scene.

How do people living in small groups without money, markets, police and rigid social classes develop norms of economic and social cooperation that are sustainable over time? This book addresses this fundamental question and explains the origin, structure and spread of stateless societies. Using insights from game theory, ethnography and archaeology, Stanish shows how ritual - broadly defined - is the key. Ritual practices encode elaborate rules of behavior and are ingenious mechanisms of organizing society in the absence of coercive states. As well as asking why and how people choose to co-operate, Stanish also provides the theoretical framework to understand this collective action problem. He goes on to highlight the evolution of cooperation with ethnographic and archaeological data from around of the world. Merging evolutionary game theory concepts with cultural evolutionary theory, this book will appeal to those seeking a transdisciplinary approach to one of the greatest problems in human evolution.

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.

This book presents high-quality original contributions on positive systems, including topics such as: monotone dynamical systems in mathematical biology and game theory; mathematical developments for networked systems in biology, chemistry and the social sciences; linear and nonlinear positive operators; dynamical analysis, observation and control of positive distributed parameter systems; stochastic realization theory; biological systems with positive variables and positive controls; iterated function systems; nonnegative dynamic processes; and dimensioning problems for collaborative systems. The book comprises a selection of the best papers presented at the POSTA 2016, the 5th International Symposium on Positive Systems, which was held in Rome, Italy, in September 2016. This conference series represents a targeted response to the growing need for research that reports on and critically discusses a wide range of topics concerning the theory and applications of positive systems.

Ecology studies biodiversity in its variety and complexity. It describes how species distribute and perform in response to environmental changes. Ecological processes and structures are highly complex and adaptive. In order to quantify emerging ecological patterns and investigate their hidden mechanisms, we need to rely on the simplicity of mathematical language. Ecological patterns are emerging structures observed in populations, communities and ecosystems. Elucidating drivers behind ecological patterns can greatly improve our knowledge of how ecosystems assemble, function and respond to change and perturbation. Mathematical ecology has, thus, become an important interdisciplinary research field that can provide answers to complex global issues, such as climate change and biological invasions. The aim of this book is to (i) introduce key concepts in ecology and evolution, (ii) explain classic and recent important mathematical models for investigating ecological and evolutionary dynamics, and (iii) provide real examples in ecology/biology/environmental sciences that have used these models to address relevant issues. Readers are exposed to the key concepts, frameworks, and terminology in the studies of ecology and evolution, which will enable them to ask the correct and relevant research questions, and frame the questions using appropriate mathematical models.

This book presents different topics related to innovation, complexity, uncertainty, modeling and simulation, fuzzy logic, decision-making, aggregation operators, business and economic applications, among others. The chapters are the results of research presented at the International Workshop "Innovation, Complexity and Uncertainty in Economics and Business", held in Barcelona, in November 2019, by The Ibero-American Network for Competitiveness, Innovation and Development (REDCID in Spanish) and the Royal Academy of Economic and Financial Sciences (RACEF in Spanish). These papers are useful for junior and senior researchers in the area of economics and business.

Contests are prevalent in many areas, including sports, rent seeking, patent races, innovation inducement, labor markets, scientific projects, crowdsourcing and other online services, and allocation of computer system resources. This book provides unified, comprehensive coverage of contest theory as developed in economics, computer science, and statistics, with a focus on online services applications, allowing professionals, researchers and students to learn about the underlying theoretical principles and to test them in practice. The book sets contest design in a game-theoretic framework that can be used to model a wide-range of problems and efficiency measures such as total and individual output and social welfare, and offers insight into how the structure of prizes relates to desired contest design objectives. Methods for rating the skills and ranking of players are presented, as are proportional allocation and similar allocation mechanisms, simultaneous contests, sharing utility of productive activities, sequential contests, and tournaments.

This book is devoted to the encounter and interaction of agents such as robots with other agents and describes how they cooperate with their previously unknown teammates, forming an Ad Hoc team. It presents a new algorithm, PLASTIC, that allows agents to quickly adapt to new teammates by reusing knowledge learned from previous teammates. PLASTIC is instantiated in both a model-based approach, PLASTIC-Model and a policy-based approach, PLASTIC-Policy. In addition to reusing knowledge learned from previous teammates, PLASTIC also allows users to provide expert-knowledge and can use transfer learning (such as the new Two Stage Transfer algorithm) to quickly create models of new teammates when it has some information about its new teammates. The effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated on three domains, ranging from multi-armed bandits to simulated robot soccer games.

Set-valued optimization is a vibrant and expanding branch of mathematics that deals with optimization problems where the objective map and/or the constraints maps are set-valued maps acting between certain spaces. Since set-valued maps subsumes single valued maps, set-valued optimization provides an important extension and unification of the scalar as well as the vector optimization problems. Therefore this relatively new discipline has justifiably attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. This book presents, in a unified framework, basic properties on ordering relations, solution concepts for set-valued optimization problems, a detailed description of convex set-valued maps, most recent developments in separation theorems, scalarization techniques, variational principles, tangent cones of first and higher order, sub-differential of set-valued maps, generalized derivatives of set-valued maps, sensitivity analysis, optimality conditions, duality and applications in economics among other things.

In this book methods from Operations Research and Game Theory are used to determine companies' profit-maximizing strategies related to pricing and (cooperative) advertising. It considers different supply chain structures as well as various distributions of power, making it possible to analyze both inter-echelon and intra-echelon dependencies between the companies' decisions. Additionally, an approach based on fuzzy set theory is presented in order to compensate for incomplete or missing data on market characteristics. Vertical cooperative advertising is an essential element of partnerships between manufacturers and retailers, allowing manufacturers to financially support their retailers' advertising efforts so as to increase sales for the entire supply chain. Given that such programs not only make up a considerable part of many companies' advertising budgets, but are also a controversial subject in many business relations, their correct design is of particular importance.

This volume consists of chapters written by eminent scientists and engineers from the international community and present significant advances in several theories, methods and applications of an interdisciplinary research. These contributions focus on both old and recent developments of Global Optimization Theory, Convex Analysis, Calculus of Variations, Discrete Mathematics and Geometry, as well as several applications to a large variety of concrete problems, including applications of computers to the study of smoothness and analyticity of functions, applications to epidemiological diffusion, networks, mathematical models of elastic and piezoelectric fields, optimal algorithms, stability of neutral type vector functional differential equations, sampling and rational interpolation for non-band-limited signals, recurrent neural network for convex optimization problems and experimental design. The book also contains some review works, which could prove particularly useful for a broader audience of readers in Mathematical and Engineering subjects and especially to graduate students who search for the latest information.

In recent years, auctions have become an important field and many markets have designed new and sophisticated auction models to assign different types of items. The prime goal of this book is to set an organized classification of the main auction mechanisms in a way that readers can understand the importance of auction design and the advantages and drawbacks of each model. Given the relevance of the subject, there is a great volume of research about this topic. Nevertheless, most of these contributions use complex mathematical language difficult to understand for the average reader. In this book, the authors summarize the main ideas of the auction theory and explain them with simple language and plenty of examples. This book is a good starting point for any researcher interested in embracing the auction design as it also includes numerous real-world examples to engage the reader in the topic. “This book fills an important gap by making the main ideas and findings of auction research accessible.� Professor Paul Milgrom, Department of Economics, Stanford University.

This book presents an introduction to Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT) which is an emerging field in the area of complex systems attracting the attention of researchers from disparate scientific communities. EGT allows one to represent and study several complex phenomena, such as the emergence of cooperation in social systems, the role of conformity in shaping the equilibrium of a population, and the dynamics in biological and ecological systems.Since EGT models belong to the area of complex systems, statistical physics constitutes a fundamental ingredient for investigating their behavior. At the same time, the complexity of some EGT models, such as those realized by means of agent-based methods, often require the implementation of numerical simulations. Therefore, beyond providing an introduction to EGT, this book gives a brief overview of the main statistical physics tools (such as phase transitions and the Ising model) and computational strategies for simulating evolutionary games (such as Monte Carlo algorithms on lattices). This book will appeal to students and researchers in this burgeoning field of complex systems.

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.

Two prisoners are told that they will be brought to a room and seated so that each can see the other. Hats will be placed on their heads; each hat is either red or green. The two prisoners must simultaneously submit a guess of their own hat color, and they both go free if at least one of them guesses correctly. While no communication is allowed once the hats have been placed, they will, however, be allowed to have a strategy session before being brought to the room. Is there a strategy ensuring their release? The answer turns out to be yes, and this is the simplest non-trivial example of a "hat problem." This book deals with the question of how successfully one can predict the value of an arbitrary function at one or more points of its domain based on some knowledge of its values at other points. Topics range from hat problems that are accessible to everyone willing to think hard, to some advanced topics in set theory and infinitary combinatorics. For example, there is a method of predicting the value f(a) of a function f mapping the reals to the reals, based only on knowledge of f's values on the open interval (a - 1, a), and for every such function the prediction is incorrect only on a countable set that is nowhere dense. The monograph progresses from topics requiring fewer prerequisites to those requiring more, with most of the text being accessible to any graduate student in mathematics. The broad range of readership includes researchers, postdocs, and graduate students in the fields of set theory, mathematical logic, and combinatorics. The hope is that this book will bring together mathematicians from different areas to think about set theory via a very broad array of coordinated inference problems.

Aligning the latest practices, innovations and case studies with academic frameworks and theories, the broad area of multi-criteria and game theory applications in manufacturing and logistics is covered in comprehensive detail. Divided into two parts, part I is dedicated to 'multi-criteria applications' and includes chapters on logistics with a focus on vehicle routing problems, a multi-objective decision making approach to select the best storage policy and an exploratory study to predict the most important factors that can lead to successful mobile supply chain management adoption for manufacturing firms. Part II covers 'game theory applications' and encompasses the process of forming a coalition within a corporate network to the problem of integrating inventory and distribution optimization together with game theory to effectively manage supply networks. Providing a forum to investigate, exchange novel ideas and disseminate knowledge covering the broad area of multi-criteria and game theory applications in manufacturing and logistics, Applications of Multi-Criteria and Game Theory Approaches is an excellent reference for students, researchers but also managers and industry professionals working with manufacturing and logistics issues.