This volume results from the "Second International Conference on Dynamics of Disasters" held in Kalamata, Greece, June 29-July 2, 2015. The conference covered particular topics involved in natural and man-made disasters such as war, chemical spills, and wildfires. Papers in this volume examine the finer points of disasters through: Critical infrastructure protection Resiliency Humanitarian logistic Relief supply chains Cooperative game theory Dynamical systems Decision making under risk and uncertainty Spread of diseases Contagion Funding for disaster relief Tools for emergency preparedness Response, and risk mitigation 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 contributed volume contains fourteen papers based on selected presentations from the European Conference on Game Theory SING11-GTM 2015, held at Saint Petersburg State University in July 2015, and the Networking Games and Management workshop, held at the Karelian Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Petrozvavodsk, Russia, also in July 2015. These papers cover a wide range of topics in game theory, including recent advances in areas with high potential for future work, as well as new developments on classical results. Some of these include A new approach to journal ranking using methods from social choice theory; A differential game of a duopoly in which two firms are competing for market share in an industry with network externalities; The impact of information propagation in the model of tax audits; A voting model in which the results of previous votes can affect the process of coalition formation in a decision-making body; The Selten-Szidarovsky technique for the analysis of Nash equilibria of games with an aggregative structure; Generalized nucleoli and generalized bargaining sets for games with restricted cooperation; Bayesian networks and games of deterrence; and A new look at the study of solutions for games in partition function form. The maturity and vitality of modern-day game theory are reflected in the new ideas, novel applications, and contributions of young researchers represented in this collection. It will be of interest to anyone doing theoretical research in game theory or working on one its numerous applications.

This book presents state-of-the-art research in political economy dealing with the decision making process under different political institutions. It focuses on the role that states and governments have on political outcomes and on the well-being of individuals, taking into account the differences that arise across autocracies and democracies and within political regimes. The research in this book is embedded with the political economy and social choice traditions and uses the rigorous frameworks of economics, political science and social choice theory to show how institutional settings shape social choices of a group of individuals or a nation. The contributions in this volume use a variety of cutting-edge game theory and mathematical tools as well as data and simulations that coupled with statistical techniques help us gain greater insights into these issues.

This thesis explores several interdisciplinary topics at the border of theoretical physics and biology, presenting results that demonstrate the power of methods from statistical physics when applied to neighbouring disciplines. From birth-death processes in switching environments to discussions on the meaning of quasi-potential landscapes in high-dimensional spaces, this thesis is a shining example of the efficacy of interdisciplinary research. The fields advanced in this work include game theory, the dynamics of cancer, and invasion of mutants in resident populations, as well as general contributions to the theory of stochastic processes. The background material provides an intuitive introduction to the theory and applications of stochastic population dynamics, and the use of techniques from statistical physics in their analysis. The thesis then builds on these foundations to address problems motivated by biological phenomena.

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 masters 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. This text is appropriate for introductory-to-intermediate courses in game theory at the upper undergraduate and master's level.

This book treats extensive form game theory in full generality. It provides a framework that does not rely on any finiteness assumptions at all, yet covers the finite case. The presentation starts by identifying the appropriate concept of a game tree. This concept represents a synthesis of earlier approaches, including the graph-theoretical and the decision-theoretical ones. It then provides a general model of sequential, interpersonal decision making, called extensive decision problems. Extensive forms are a special case thereof, which is such that all strategy profiles induce outcomes and do so uniquely. Requiring the existence of immediate predecessors yields discrete extensive forms, which are still general enough to cover almost all applications. The treatment culminates in a characterization of the topologies on the plays of the game tree that admit equilibrium analysis.

This monograph provides a detailed analysis on fair queueing rules from a normative, a strategic, and a non-cooperative viewpoint. The queueing problem is concerned with the following situation: There is a group of agents who must be served in a facility. The facility can handle only one agent at a time and agents incur waiting costs. The problem is to find the order in which to serve agents and monetary transfers they should receive. The queueing problem has been studied extensively in the recent literature.

This book gathers carefully selected works in Mathematical Economics, on myriad topics including General Equilibrium, Game Theory, Economic Growth, Welfare, Social Choice Theory, Finance. It sheds light on the ongoing discussions that have brought together leading researchers from Latin America and Southern Europe at recent conferences in venues like Porto, Portugal; Athens, Greece; and Guanajuato, Mexico. With this volume, the editors not only contribute to the advancement of research in these areas, but also inspire other scholars around the globe to collaborate and research these vibrant, emerging topics.

This book provides the state of the art in the simulation and gaming study field by systematically collecting excellent papers presented at the 46th International Simulation and Gaming Association annual conference held in Kyoto 17-25 July 2015. Simulation and gaming has been used in a wide variety of areas ranging from early childhood education and school-age children, universities, and professional education, to policy exploration and social problem solving. Moreover, it now been drastically changing its features in the Internet Of Things (IOT) society while taking over a wide variety of aliases, such as serious games and gamification. Most of the papers on which this book's chapters are based were written by academic researchers, both up-and-coming and well known. In addition, simulation and gaming is a translational system science going from theory to clinical cross-disciplinary topics. With this book, therefore, graduate students and higher-level researchers, educators, and practitioners can become familiar with the state-of-the-art academic research on simulation and gaming in the network society of the twenty-first century.

This book gathers a selection of peer-reviewed papers presented at the International Conference on Operations Research (OR 2017), which was held at Freie Universitat Berlin, Germany on September 6-8, 2017. More than 800 scientists, practitioners and students from mathematics, computer science, business/economics and related fields attended the conference and presented more than 500 papers in parallel topic streams, as well as special award sessions. The main theme of the conference and its proceedings was "Decision Analytics for the Digital Economy."

This book reports on advanced theories and cutting-edge applications in the field of soft computing. The individual chapters, written by leading researchers, are based on contributions presented during the 4th World Conference on Soft Computing, held May 25-27, 2014, in Berkeley. The book covers a wealth of key topics in soft computing, focusing on both fundamental aspects and applications. The former include fuzzy mathematics, type-2 fuzzy sets, evolutionary-based optimization, aggregation and neural networks, while the latter include soft computing in data analysis, image processing, decision-making, classification, series prediction, economics, control, and modeling. By providing readers with a timely, authoritative view on the field, and by discussing thought-provoking developments and challenges, the book will foster new research directions in the diverse areas of soft computing.

This book offers a thorough examination of potential game theory and its applications in radio resource management for wireless communications systems and networking. The book addresses two major research goals: how to identify a given game as a potential game, and how to design the utility functions and the potential functions with certain special properties in order to formulate a potential game. After proposing a unifying mathematical framework for the identification of potential games, the text surveys existing applications of this technique within wireless communications and networking problems found in OFDMA 3G/4G/WiFi networks, as well as next-generation systems such as cognitive radios and dynamic spectrum access networks. Professionals interested in understanding the theoretical aspect of this specialized field will find Potential Game Theory a valuable resource, as will advanced-level engineering students. It paves the way for extensive and rigorous research exploration on a topic whose capacity for practical applications is vast but not yet fully exploited.

The book provides a thorough treatment of set functions, games and capacities as well as integrals with respect to capacities and games, in a mathematical rigorous presentation and in view of application to decision making. After a short chapter introducing some required basic knowledge (linear programming, polyhedra, ordered sets) and notation, the first part of the book consists of three long chapters developing the mathematical aspects. This part is not related to a particular application field and, by its neutral mathematical style, is useful to the widest audience. It gathers many results and notions which are scattered in the literature of various domains (game theory, decision, combinatorial optimization and operations research). The second part consists of three chapters, applying the previous notions in decision making and modelling: decision under uncertainty, decision with multiple criteria, possibility theory and Dempster-Shafer theory.

This book describes argumentative tools and strategies that can be used to guide policy decisions under conditions of great uncertainty. Contributing authors explore methods from philosophical analysis and in particular argumentation analysis, showing how it can be used to systematize discussions about policy issues involving great uncertainty. The first part of the work explores how to deal in a systematic way with decision-making when there may be plural perspectives on the decision problem, along with unknown consequences of what we do. Readers will see how argumentation tools can be used for prioritizing among uncertain dangers, for determining how decisions should be framed, for choosing a suitable time frame for a decision, and for systematically choosing among different decision options. Case studies are presented in the second part of the book, showing argumentation in practice in the areas of climate geoengineering, water governance, synthetic biology, nuclear waste, and financial markets. In one example, argumentation analysis is applied to proposals to solve the climate problem with various technological manipulations of the natural climate system, such as massive dispersion of reflective aerosols into the stratosphere. Even after a thorough investigation of such a proposal, doubt remains as to whether all the potential risks have been identified. In such discussions, conventional risk analysis does not have much to contribute since it presupposes that the risks have been identified, whereas the argumentative approach to uncertainty management can be used to systematize discussions.

This volume presents 38 classic texts in formal epistemology, and strengthens the ties between research into this area of philosophy and its neighbouring intellectual disciplines. The editors provide introductions to five subsections: Bayesian Epistemology, Belief Change, Decision Theory, Interactive Epistemology and Epistemic Logic. 'Formal epistemology' is a term coined in the late 1990s for a new constellation of interests in philosophy, the origins of which are found in earlier works of epistemologists, philosophers of science and logicians. It addresses a growing agenda of problems concerning knowledge, belief, certainty, rationality, deliberation, decision, strategy, action and agent interaction - and it does so using methods from logic, probability, computability, decision and game theory. The volume also includes a thorough index and suggestions for further reading, and thus offers a complete teaching and research package for students as well as research scholars of formal epistemology, philosophy, logic, computer science, theoretical economics and cognitive psychology.

This book studies storage policies in warehousing systems and maintenance-support strategies for critical operational systems in warehouses, which are the most important issues affecting operational efficiency of warehousing systems. It expands on the theory of class-based storage by considering a finite number of items in store, and also introduces the maintenance-support strategy founded on performance-based contract theory. It is a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners and engineers in the fields of industrial engineering, operations management, operations research and management science.

Sebastian Meiswinkel studies optimization problems that arise at container ports from a classic optimization as well as from a mechanism design point of view. The first part of this dissertation is focused on scheduling problems with selfish job owners that have private information about their characteristics. Afterwards the transportations of containers between the quay and a storage area is considered. Variants of this problem are analyzed for utilization of reach stackers and straddle carriers.

This monograph studies multi-member households or, more generally, socio-economic groups from a purely theoretical perspective and within a general equilibrium framework, in contrast to a sizeable empirical literature. The approach is based on the belief that households, their composition, decisions and behavior within a competitive market economy deserve thorough examination. The authors set out to link the formation, composition, decision-making, and stability of households. They develop general equilibrium models of pure exchange economies in which households can have several, typically heterogeneous members and act as collective decision-making units on the one hand and as competitive market participants on the other hand. Moreover, the more advanced models combine traditional exchange (markets for commodities) and matching (markets for people or partners) and develop implications for welfare, social structures, and economic policy. In the field of family economics, Hans Haller and Hans Gersbach have pioneered a 'market' approach that applies the tools of general equilibrium theory to the analysis of household behavior. This very interesting book presents an overview of their methods and results. This is an inspiring work. Pierre-Andre Chiappori, Columbia University, USA The sophisticated, insightful and challenging analysis presented in this book extends the theory of the multi-person household along an important but relatively neglected dimension, that of general equilibrium theory. It also challenges GE theorists themselves to follow Paul Samuelson in taking seriously the real attributes of that fundamental building block, the household, as a social group whose decisions may not satisfy the standard axioms of individual choice. This synthesis and extension of their earlier work by Gersbach and Haller will prove to be a seminal contribution in its field. Ray Rees, LMU Munich, Germany

This book presents the theory and practical applications of the Master equation approach, which provides a powerful general framework for model building in a variety of disciplines. The aim of the book is to not only highlight different mathematical solution methods, but also reveal their potential by means of practical examples. Part I of the book, which can be used as a toolbox, introduces selected statistical fundamentals and solution methods for the Master equation. In Part II and Part III, the Master equation approach is applied to important applications in the natural and social sciences. The case studies presented mainly hail from the social sciences, including urban and regional dynamics, population dynamics, dynamic decision theory, opinion formation and traffic dynamics; however, some applications from physics and chemistry are treated as well, underlining the interdisciplinary modelling potential of the Master equation approach. Drawing upon the author's extensive teaching and research experience and consulting work, the book offers a valuable guide for researchers, graduate students and professionals alike.

This contributed volume combines approaches of the current inequality debate with aspects of finance based on profound macroeconomic model analyses. Research on inequality has had a long tradition in economics. With the financial crisis from 2007, not only output decreased tremendously, but also inequality has risen since then. The book presents selected contributions of a workshop held at Bielefeld University in 2016 and features additional papers written by experts in the field. A mixture of established researchers and young scholars presents both theoretical and empirical frameworks to analyze the subject.

Facility location theory develops the idea of locating one or more facilities by optimizing suitable criteria such as minimizing transportation cost, or capturing the largest market share. The contributions in this book focus an approach to facility location theory through game theoretical tools highlighting situations where a location decision is faced by several decision makers and leading to a game theoretical framework in non-cooperative and cooperative methods. Models and methods regarding the facility location via game theory are explored and applications are illustrated through economics, engineering, and physics. Mathematicians, engineers, economists and computer scientists working in theory, applications and computational aspects of facility location problems using game theory will find this book useful.

This undergraduate text explores a variety of large-scale phenomena - global warming, ice ages, water, poverty - and uses these case studies as a motivation to explore nonlinear dynamics, power-law statistics, and complex systems. Although the detailed mathematical descriptions of these topics can be challenging, the consequences of a system being nonlinear, power-law, or complex are in fact quite accessible. This book blends a tutorial approach to the mathematical aspects of complex systems together with a complementary narrative on the global/ecological/societal implications of such systems. Nearly all engineering undergraduate courses focus on mathematics and systems which are small scale, linear, and Gaussian. Unfortunately there is not a single large-scale ecological or social phenomenon that is scalar, linear, and Gaussian. This book offers students insights to better understand the large-scale problems facing the world and to realize that these cannot be solved by a single, narrow academic field or perspective. Instead, the book seeks to emphasize understanding, concepts, and ideas, in a way that is mathematically rigorous, so that the concepts do not feel vague, but not so technical that the mathematics get in the way. The book is intended for undergraduate students in a technical domain such as engineering, computer science, physics, mathematics, and environmental studies.

This book presents the state-of-the-art in non-linear dynamics and sunspots. These two topics have been the core of an international conference on instability and public policies in a globalized world, organized at Aix-Marseille School of Economics and GREQAM in honor of Jean-Michel Grandmont. He has made significant contributions on general equilibrium theory, monetary theory, learning, aggregation, non-linear dynamics and sunspots. This book assembles contributions by Jean-Michel Grandmont's colleagues, students and friends that have been influenced by his works and that are at the frontier of research in this domain today.

This book covers recent advances in Complex Automated Negotiations as a widely studied emerging area in the field of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. The book includes selected revised and extended papers from the 7th International Workshop on Agent-Based Complex Automated Negotiation (ACAN2014), which was held in Paris, France, in May 2014. The book also includes brief introductions about Agent-based Complex Automated Negotiation which are based on tutorials provided in the workshop, and brief summaries and descriptions about the ANAC'14 (Automated Negotiating Agents Competition) competition, where authors of selected finalist agents explain the strategies and the ideas used by them. The book is targeted to academic and industrial researchers in various communities of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems, such as agreement technology, mechanism design, electronic commerce, related areas, as well as graduate, undergraduate, and PhD students working in those areas or having interest in them.

This book is the fourth in a multidisciplinary series which brings together leading researchers in the STEAM-H disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, Agriculture, Mathematics and Health) to present their perspective on advances in their own specific fields, and to generate a genuinely interdisciplinary collaboration that transcends parochial subject-matter boundaries. All contributions are carefully edited, peer-reviewed, reasonably self-contained, and pedagogically crafted for a multidisciplinary readership. Contributions are drawn from a variety of fields including mathematics, statistics, game theory and behavioral sciences, biomathematics and physical chemistry, computer science and human-centered computing. This volume is dedicated to Professor Christiane Rousseau, whose work inspires the STEAM-H series, in recognition of her passion for the mathematical sciences and her on-going initiative, the Mathematics of Planet Earth paradigm of interdisciplinarity. The volume's primary goal is to enhance interdisciplinary understanding between these areas of research by showing how new advances in a particular field can be relevant to open problems in another and how many disciplines contribute to a better understanding of relevant issues at the interface of mathematics and the sciences. The main emphasis is on important methods, research directions and applications of analysis within and beyond each field. As such, the volume aims to foster student interest and participation in the STEAM-H domain, as well as promote interdisciplinary research collaborations. The volume is valuable as a reference of choice and a source of inspiration for a broad spectrum of scientists, mathematicians, research students and postdoctoral fellows.