Russell Ackoff is a very special management thinker. As an architect, city planner, doctor of philosophy, behavioral scientist, trailblazer in the fields of organizational, operations, and systems theory, bestselling author, distinguished Wharton School professor, and head of his own management education and consulting firm, he qualifies, as do few others in this century, for the title of "Renaissance Man." Fortunately, he makes up for this grievous shortcoming by also being an outrageously funny observer of homo commercium. Now, Ackoff's Best offers you an opportunity to become acquainted with this irreverent genius who, over the past forty years, has done so much to shape our understanding of the modern business organization.

Compiled by the author, Ackoff's Best encapsulates the author's most controversial, influential, and wittiest work to appear since the 1970s. Ackoff's groundbreaking exploration of systems theory and its effect on business provides the backbone of this collection. Also included are his most lasting and thought-provoking writings on an array of topics in business, society, and human behavior that well reflect the sweeping scope of Ackoff's intellect and expertise. From managing teams, maximizing the effectiveness of information systems, and problem solving, to creativity, crime, and the role of the corporation in a democratic society, these writings are a cornucopia of insights, observations, and powerful lessons that will help you maximize your personal development and the effectiveness of your organization.

An excellent introduction for newcomers to Russell Ackoff, and a welcome compendium of Ackoff's pithiest writings for those already familiar with his ideas from such classic works as Creating the Corporate Future and The Art of Problem Solving, Ackoff's Best is required reading for every intelligent businessperson.

"The range, depth, and perspectives of these essays on management illustrate, once again, Russ Ackoff's unique genius."—Warren Bennis, University Professor, University of Southern California, and Co-author, Co-Leaders

"Russ Ackoff uses words that cut through the familiar and open doors in one's brain."—Arie P. de Geus, Author, The Living Company

"Ackoff's Best captures the lucid and compelling explorations of one of the most profound and influential thinkers of our time."—Ray Stata, Chairman of the Board, Analog Devices

"This collection reminds me that I have learned my most valuable lessons from Russ Ackoff."—Vince Barabba, General Manager, Corporate Strategy and Knowledge Development, General Motors Corporation

This book mainly introduces some techniques of decision-making, uncertain reasoning and regression analysis under the hesitant fuzzy environment and expands the applications of hesitant fuzzy sets in solving practical problems. The book pursues three major objectives: (1) to introduce some techniques about decision-making, uncertain reasoning and regression analysis under the hesitant fuzzy environment, (2) to prove these techniques theoretically and (3) to apply the involved techniques to practical problems. The book is especially valuable for readers to understand how hesitant fuzzy set could be employed in decision-making, uncertain reasoning and regression analysis and motivates researchers to expand more application fields of hesitant fuzzy set.

This open access book reports on innovative methods, technologies and strategies for mastering uncertainty in technical systems. Despite the fact that current research on uncertainty is mainly focusing on uncertainty quantification and analysis, this book gives emphasis to innovative ways to master uncertainty in engineering design, production and product usage alike. It gathers authoritative contributions by more than 30 scientists reporting on years of research in the areas of engineering, applied mathematics and law, thus offering a timely, comprehensive and multidisciplinary account of theories and methods for quantifying data, model and structural uncertainty, and of fundamental strategies for mastering uncertainty. It covers key concepts such as robustness, flexibility and resilience in detail. All the described methods, technologies and strategies have been validated with the help of three technical systems, i.e. the Modular Active Spring-Damper System, the Active Air Spring and the 3D Servo Press, which have been in turn developed and tested during more than ten years of cooperative research. Overall, this book offers a timely, practice-oriented reference guide to graduate students, researchers and professionals dealing with uncertainty in the broad field of mechanical engineering.

This book identifies the responsibilities of management in the regulatory territories of the FAA (USA), the EASA (European Union) and the GCAA (UAE), identifying the daily challenges of leadership in ensuring their company is meeting the regulatory obligations of compliance, safety and security that will satisfy the regulator while also meeting the fiducial responsibilities of running an economically viable and efficient lean company that will satisfy the shareholders.

Detailing each responsibility of the Accountable Manager, the author breaks them down to understandable and achievable elements where methods, systems and techniques can be applied to ensure the role holder is knowledgeable of accountabilities and is confident that they are not only compliant with the civil aviation regulations but also running an efficient and effective operation. This includes the defining of an Accountable Manager "tool kit" as well as possible software "dashboards" that focus the Accountable Manager on the important analytics, such as the information and data available, as well as making the maximum use of their expert post holder team.

This book will be of interest to leadership of all aviation- related companies, such as airlines, charter operators, private and executive operators, flying schools, aircraft and component maintenance facilities, aircraft manufacturers, engine manufacturers, component manufacturers, regulators, legal companies, leasing companies, banks and finance houses, departments of transport, etc; any relevant organisation regulated and licensed by civil aviation authority. It can also be used by students within a wide range of aviation courses at colleges, universities and training academies.

Global Logistics Network Modelling and Policy provides guidelines on quality policy, covering investments, management and planning for port and hinterland infrastructure, roads, railways and inland waterway ports. The book first describes the authors' concept and formulation models, followed by a description and analysis of the applied data. As shipping companies fiercely compete in an effort to achieve greater efficiency and impact infrastructure policy and plan for the entire supply chain, they need tactics that drive quality transportation policy and new ways to model and simulate worldwide cargo movements, all while estimating demand and capacity of systems. This book provides quantitative tools for modeling, analysis, and simulation of worldwide, inter-modal cargo movement - helping forecast the impacts of logistics and related policies in each region of the world. It covers useful applications for every region of the world, allowing policymakers to tailor results for their own specific uses.

Industry consolidation, mergers, changes to business models, the emergence of new threats all require managers to understand highly complex situations, assess risk and opportunity and make informed decisions. How can senior managers do this effectively when so often they are wrestling with brand new scenarios? One of the emerging solutions is business wargaming. Daniel F. Oriesek and Jan Oliver Schwarz provide the first comprehensive look at wargaming as a business tool in a book that explores the anatomy and success factors of a typical wargame. The authors explain how and when wargaming can be used to test strategies, plan and prepare for crises, manage change or increase your organization's ability to anticipate and adapt for the future. Creating imaginative and credible scenarios, and testing them against smart opponents who are eager to find holes and counter your strategy, allows you to learn about a plan or a new venture in the security of the conference room rather than learning the hard way when you go live. Business wargames are sophisticated but they are also very demanding in terms of time and resources. Business Wargaming: Securing Corporate Value will enable you to assess the potential value of the technique for your own organization, to understand what you will be committing to and develop an informed business case and brief for working with the organization that will facilitate the game.

Customer-Oriented Optimization in Public Transportation develops models, results and algorithms for optimizing public transportation from a customer-oriented point of view. The methods used are based on graph-theoretic approaches and integer programming. The specific topics are all motivated by real-world examples which occurred in practical projects. An appendix summarizes some of the basics of optimization needed to interpret the material in the book. In detail, the topics the book covers in its three parts are as follows: Stop location - Does it make sense to open new stations along existing bus or railway lines? If yes, in which locations? The problem is modeled as a continuous covering problem. To solve it, the author develops a finite dominating set and shows that efficient methods are possible if the special structure of the covering matrix is used; Delay management - Should a train wait for delayed feeder trains or should it depart in time?

Intellectual property has rapidly become one of the most important, as well as most controversial, subjects in recent years amongst productive thinkers of many kinds all over the world. Scientific work and technological progress now depend largely on questions of who owns what, as do the success and profits of countless authors, artists, inventors, researchers and industrialists. Economic, legal and ethical issues play a central role in the increasingly complex balance between unilateral gains and universal benefits from the "knowledge society." Economics, Law and Intellectual Property explores the field in both depth and breadth through the latest views of leading experts in Europe and the United States. It provides a fundamental understanding of the problems and potential solutions, not only in doing practical business with ideas and innovations, but also on the level of institutions that influence such business. Addressing a range of readers from individual scholars to company managers and policy makers, it gives a unique perspective on current developments.

This research monograph summarizes a line of research that maps certain classical problems of discrete mathematics and operations research - such as the Hamiltonian Cycle and the Travelling Salesman Problems - into convex domains where continuum analysis can be carried out. Arguably, the inherent difficulty of these, now classical, problems stems precisely from the discrete nature of domains in which these problems are posed. The convexification of domains underpinning these results is achieved by assigning probabilistic interpretation to key elements of the original deterministic problems. In particular, the approaches summarized here build on a technique that embeds Hamiltonian Cycle and Travelling Salesman Problems in a structured singularly perturbed Markov decision process. The unifying idea is to interpret subgraphs traced out by deterministic policies (including Hamiltonian cycles, if any) as extreme points of a convex polyhedron in a space filled with randomized policies. The above innovative approach has now evolved to the point where there are many, both theoretical and algorithmic, results that exploit the nexus between graph theoretic structures and both probabilistic and algebraic entities of related Markov chains. The latter include moments of first return times, limiting frequencies of visits to nodes, or the spectra of certain matrices traditionally associated with the analysis of Markov chains. However, these results and algorithms are dispersed over many research papers appearing in journals catering to disparate audiences. As a result, the published manuscripts are often written in a very terse manner and use disparate notation, thereby making it difficult for new researchers to make use of the many reported advances. Hence the main purpose of this book is to present a concise and yet easily accessible synthesis of the majority of the theoretical and algorithmic results obtained so far. In addition, the book discusses numerous open questions and problems that arise from this body of work and which are yet to be fully solved. The approach casts the Hamiltonian Cycle Problem in a mathematical framework that permits analytical concepts and techniques, not used hitherto in this context, to be brought to bear to further clarify both the underlying difficulty of NP-completeness of this problem and the relative exceptionality of truly difficult instances. Finally, the material is arranged in such a manner that the introductory chapters require very little mathematical background and discuss instances of graphs with interesting structures that motivated a lot of the research in this topic. More difficult results are introduced later and are illustrated with numerous examples.

Sociological theories of crime include: theories of strain blame crime on personal stressors; theories of social learning blame crime on its social rewards, and see crime more as an institution in conflict with other institutions rather than as in- vidual deviance; and theories of control look at crime as natural and rewarding, and explore the formation of institutions that control crime. Theorists of corruption generally agree that corruption is an expression of the Patron-Client relationship in which a person with access to resources trades resources with kin and members of the community in exchange for loyalty. Some approaches to modeling crime and corruption do not involve an explicit simulation: rule based systems; Bayesian networks; game theoretic approaches, often based on rational choice theory; and Neoclassical Econometrics, a rational choice-based approach. Simulation-based approaches take into account greater complexities of interacting parts of social phenomena. These include fuzzy cognitive maps and fuzzy rule sets that may incorporate feedback; and agent-based simulation, which can go a step farther by computing new social structures not previously identified in theory. The latter include cognitive agent models, in which agents learn how to perceive their en- ronment and act upon the perceptions of their individual experiences; and reactive agent simulation, which, while less capable than cognitive-agent simulation, is adequate for testing a policy's effects with existing societal structures. For example, NNL is a cognitive agent model based on the REPAST Simphony toolkit.

Questioning why research centers so often fail to commercialize discoveries, this book explores the concept of linked innovation, which promises to drive economic sustainability while preserving academic quality at research centers. The author examines the gaps in the innovation process and identifies eight symptoms of broken innovation. Providing empirical research into areas such as performance metrics, design thinking, industry collaboration, and innovation ecosystems, this comprehensive study covers 28 mechanisms and 12 business models for driving growth in those centers. Essential reading for managing directors at research institutions and academics, Linked Innovation draws on examples from leading research centers at universities, in industry and government. Based on a four-year analysis of 3,881 centers in 107 countries, the book looks at institutions such as Harvard, Oxford and organizations such as Roche, Google, Fraunhofer and NASA to name a few.

This book presents innovative and high-quality research regarding advanced decision support systems (DSSs). It describes the foundations, methods, methodologies, models, tools, and techniques for designing, developing, implementing and evaluating advanced DSSs in different fields, including finance, health, emergency management, industry and pollution control. Decision support systems employ artificial intelligence methods to heuristically address problems that are cannot be solved using formal techniques. In this context, technologies such as the Semantic Web, linked data, big data, and machine learning are being applied to provide integrated support for individuals and organizations to make more rational decisions. The book is organized into two parts. The first part covers decision support systems for industry, while the second part presents case studies related to clinical emergency management and pollution control.

Effective decision-making while trading off the constraints and conflicting multiple objectives under rapid technological developments, massive generation of data, and extreme volatility is of paramount importance to organizations to win over the time-based competition today. While agility is a crucial issue, the firms have been increasingly relying on evidence-based decision-making through intelligent decision support systems driven by computational intelligence and automation to achieve a competitive advantage.  The decisions are no longer confined to a specific functional area. Instead, business organizations today find actionable insight for formulating future courses of action by integrating multiple objectives and perspectives. Therefore, multi-objective decision-making plays a critical role in businesses and industries. In this regard, the importance of Operations Research (OR) models and their applications enables the firms to derive optimum solutions subject to various constraints and/or objectives while considering multiple functional areas of the organizations together. Hence, researchers and practitioners have extensively applied OR models to solve various organizational issues related to manufacturing, service, supply chain and logistics management, human resource management, finance, and market analysis, among others. Further, OR models driven by AI have been enabled to provide intelligent decision-support frameworks for achieving sustainable development goals. The present issue provides a unique platform to showcase the contributions of the leading international experts on production systems and business from academia, industry, and government to discuss the issues in intelligent manufacturing, operations management, financial management, supply chain management, and Industry 4.0 in the Artificial Intelligence era. Some of the general (but not specific) scopes of this proceeding entail OR models such as Optimization and Control, Combinatorial Optimization, Queuing Theory, Resource Allocation Models, Linear and Nonlinear Programming Models, Multi-objective and multi-attribute Decision Models, Statistical Quality Control along with AI, Bayesian Data Analysis, Machine Learning and Econometrics and their applications vis-à-vis AI & Data-driven Production Management, Marketing and Retail Management, Financial Management, Human Resource Management, Operations Management, Smart Manufacturing & Industry 4.0, Supply Chain and Logistics Management, Digital Supply Network, Healthcare Administration, Inventory Management, consumer behavior, security analysis, and portfolio management and sustainability.   The present issue shall be of interest to the faculty members, students, and scholars of various engineering and social science institutions and universities, along with the practitioners and policymakers of different industries and organizations.

Focuses on the use of simulation techniques to model and evaluate repetitive construction operations. Based on the CYCLONE and MICROCYCLONE software developed by the authors and used at 38 universities nationwide, it uses a variety of examples from all areas of construction to demonstrate the application of simulation to analyze construction operations.

This text is among the first to reveal the intricacies of an airline’s Operations Control Centre; especially the thought processes, information flows, and strategies taken to mitigate disruptions.

Airline Operations Control provides a deep level of description, explanation and detail into the activities of a range of highly professional and expert staff managing the ‘sharp’ end of the airline. It aims to fill a void as little is understood about this area, and very little is written for practitioners in the airline business. The book offers a comprehensive look at the make-up of the Operations Centre, its component sections, and the processes that occur both in preparing for and executing the current day’s schedules. Several chapters provide real-life scenarios and demonstrate how Operations Centres manage evolving situations – what they need to take into account, and how they need to have Plan B and Plan C ready when things don’t go right.

This book is designed to deliver knowledge gains to both new and experienced aviation industry practitioners with regards to vital operational aspects. Additionally, it also offers students of air transport management a readily accessible and real-world-perspective guide to a crucial function present within every airline.

Table of Contents

Part I: Operations Function 1: Operations Control 2: Composition of the IOC 3: Operational Planning and Preparation 4: Operational Processes Part II: Operational Control in Practice 5: Scenario based Information Flows 6: Weather Scenario: Snow at JFK Airport 7: Weather Scenario: Thunderstorms at SYD Airport 8: Multi-Engineering Scenario: Unserviceabilities in the Network 9: Operations Control in the Future

This book presents advanced case studies that address a range of important issues arising in space engineering. An overview of challenging operational scenarios is presented, with an in-depth exposition of related mathematical modeling, algorithmic and numerical solution aspects. The model development and optimization approaches discussed in the book can be extended also towards other application areas. The topics discussed illustrate current research trends and challenges in space engineering as summarized by the following list: * Next Generation Gravity Missions * Continuous-Thrust Trajectories by Evolutionary Neurocontrol * Nonparametric Importance Sampling for Launcher Stage Fallout * Dynamic System Control Dispatch * Optimal Launch Date of Interplanetary Missions * Optimal Topological Design * Evidence-Based Robust Optimization * Interplanetary Trajectory Design by Machine Learning * Real-Time Optimal Control * Optimal Finite Thrust Orbital Transfers * Planning and Scheduling of Multiple Satellite Missions * Trajectory Performance Analysis * Ascent Trajectory and Guidance Optimization * Small Satellite Attitude Determination and Control * Optimized Packings in Space Engineering * Time-Optimal Transfers of All-Electric GEO Satellites Researchers working on space engineering applications will find this work a valuable, practical source of information. Academics, graduate and post-graduate students working in aerospace, engineering, applied mathematics, operations research, and optimal control will find useful information regarding model development and solution techniques, in conjunction with real-world applications.

"Bayesian Networks and Influence Diagrams: A Guide to Construction and Analysis, Second Edition, "provides a comprehensive guide for practitioners who wish to understand, construct, and analyze intelligent systems for decision support based on probabilistic networks. This new edition contains six new sections, in addition to fully-updated examples, tables, figures, and a revised appendix. Intended primarily for practitioners, this book does not require sophisticated mathematical skills or deep understanding of the underlying theory and methods nor does it discuss alternative technologies for reasoning under uncertainty. The theory and methods presented are illustrated through more than 140 examples, and exercises are included for the reader to check his or her level of understanding. The techniques and methods presented for knowledge elicitation, model construction and verification, modeling techniques and tricks, learning models from data, and analyses of models have all been developed and refined on the basis of numerous courses that the authors have held for practitioners worldwide. "

This indispensable text offers students a high quality treatment of strategic operations management. It provides the reader with a clear understanding of the importance and nature of operations strategy by determining exactly which management activities, core competencies, resources and technologies underpin an operational strategy. The book demonstrates how various operational elements and components can be combined and customised into unique operational strategies. When these strategies are correctly implemented, they provide sustainable competitive advantage and allow firms to provide a diverse range of services and goods in their increasingly demanding, complex and dynamic marketplaces and spaces.
Includes chapters covering customising operational strategies for retail, manufacturing, services and SMEs, and sections on eBusiness and complexity theory in relation to operations theory.
Features include:
*extended case-studies including several from Europe and the USA
*case vignettes
*learning objectives
*key terms
*chapter introduction and 'maps' to aid reader accessibility
*'time out' boxes to prompt the reader to reflect on what has been learnt
*'critical reflection' boxes that analyse theories and models.

Related link: www.routledge.com/textbooks/0415256542

This book introduces the theory and applications of uncertain optimal control, and establishes two types of models including expected value uncertain optimal control and optimistic value uncertain optimal control. These models, which have continuous-time forms and discrete-time forms, make use of dynamic programming. The uncertain optimal control theory relates to equations of optimality, uncertain bang-bang optimal control, optimal control with switched uncertain system, and optimal control for uncertain system with time-delay. Uncertain optimal control has applications in portfolio selection, engineering, and games. The book is a useful resource for researchers, engineers, and students in the fields of mathematics, cybernetics, operations research, industrial engineering, artificial intelligence, economics, and management science.

Many decision problems in Operations Research are defined on temporal networks, that is, workflows of time-consuming tasks whose processing order is constrained by precedence relations. For example, temporal networks are used to model projects, computer applications, digital circuits and production processes. Optimization problems arise in temporal networks when a decision maker wishes to determine a temporal arrangement of the tasks and/or a resource assignment that optimizes some network characteristic (e.g. the time required to complete all tasks). The parameters of these optimization problems (e.g. the task durations) are typically unknown at the time the decision problem arises. This monograph investigates solution techniques for optimization problems in temporal networks that explicitly account for this parameter uncertainty. We study several formulations, each of which requires different information about the uncertain problem parameters.

Operational research is a collection of modelling techniques used to structure, analyse, and solve problems related to the design and operation of complex human systems. While many argue that operational research should play a key role in improving healthcare services, staff may be largely unaware of its potential applications. This Element explores operational research's wartime origins and introduce several approaches that operational researchers use to help healthcare organisations: address well-defined decision problems; account for multiple stakeholder perspectives; and describe how system performance may be impacted by changing the configuration or operation of services. The authors draw on examples that illustrate the valuable perspective that operational research brings to improvement initiatives and the challenges of implementing and scaling operational research solutions. They discuss how operational researchers are working to surmount these problems and suggest further research to help operational researchers have greater beneficial impact in healthcare improvement. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This book offers an in-depth and comprehensive introduction to the priority methods of intuitionistic preference relations, the consistency and consensus improving procedures for intuitionistic preference relations, the approaches to group decision making based on intuitionistic preference relations, the approaches and models for interactive decision making with intuitionistic fuzzy information, and the extended results in interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy environments.

This handbook is a compilation of comprehensive reference sources that provide state-of-the-art findings on both theoretical and applied research on sustainable fashion supply chain management. It contains three parts, organized under the headings of "Reviews and Discussions," "Analytical Research," and "Empirical Research," featuring peer-reviewed papers contributed by researchers from Asia, Europe, and the US. This book is the first to focus on sustainable supply chain management in the fashion industry and is therefore a pioneering text on this topic. In the fashion industry, disposable fashion under the fast fashion concept has become a trend. In this trend, fashion supply chains must be highly responsive to market changes and able to produce fashion products in very small quantities to satisfy changing consumer needs. As a result, new styles will appear in the market within a very short time and fashion brands such as Zara can reduce the whole process cycle from conceptual design to a final ready-to-sell "well-produced and packaged" product on the retail sales floor within a few weeks. From the supply chain's perspective, the fast fashion concept helps to match supply and demand and lowers inventory. Moreover, since many fast fashion companies, e.g., Zara, H&M, and Topshop, adopt a local sourcing approach and obtain supply from local manufacturers (to cut lead time), the corresponding carbon footprint is much reduced. Thus, this local sourcing scheme under fast fashion would enhance the level of environmental friendliness compared with the more traditional offshore sourcing. Furthermore, since the fashion supply chain is notorious for generating high volumes of pollutants, involving hazardous materials in the production processes, and producing products by companies with low social responsibility, new management principles and theories, especially those that take into account consumer behaviours and preferences, need to be developed to address many of these issues in order to achieve the goal of sustainable fashion supply chain management. The topics covered include Reverse Logistics of US Carpet Recycling; Green Brand Strategies in the Fashion Industry; Impacts of Social Media on Consumers' Disposals of Apparel; Fashion Supply Chain Network Competition with Eco-labelling; Reverse Logistics as a Sustainable Supply Chain Practice for the Fashion Industry; Apparel Manufacturers' Path to World-class Corporate Social Responsibility; Sustainable Supply Chain Management in the Slow-Fashion Industry; Mass Market Second-hand Clothing Retail Operations in Hong Kong; Constraints and Drivers of Growth in the Ethical Fashion Sector: The case of France; and Effects of Used Garment Collection Programmes in Fast Fashion Brands.

This book addresses the measurement of the effect of information technology (IT) investments on a firm's productivity. Determining a quantifiable impact of a firm's IT has plagued senior executives, researchers, and policy-makers for several years, as evidenced by articles in trade magazines such as Fortune and Businessweek and in academic journals such as Management Science. Simple statistical techniques for measuring IT impact in a firm are fraught with methodological problems, as these techniques do not account for either the causal direction in managerial decision making or the behavioral assumptions about firms. Therefore, such studies have led to results and inferences that are not generalizable. While studies that measure the satisfaction of people who use IT are important, management typically would like to know whether IT has reduced operation costs by streamlining processes or increased revenues by increasing the demand-meeting capability of the firm. This book attempts to determine cost-reduction or output-enhancement that may be linked to IT investments through methodological sophistication.
The healthcare industry presents an important and interesting context in which to study IT impacts for several reasons. First, since the implementation of the Prospective Payment System (PPS) by Medicaid, most hospitals adopted cost containment measures, and hence capital investments in hospitals have come under greater scrutiny than ever before. Second, hospitals have been more thorough in reporting capital and labor expenses and revenues (due to state regulation) at a level of detail that makes it possible to aggregate IT and other capital investments without serious measurementerror. Most non-healthcare firms do not collect or report such data in their financial statements. Finally, though hospitals were slow in IT adoption, most hospitals have been acquiring sophisticated hardware and software over the past few years.
Results of the analysis bear evidence of the positive impact of IT on production of healthcare services. It also shows how methodological differences can lead to conflicting results. The effect of PPS determined in a comparative way shows that the economic behavior in the post-PPS differs from that in the pre-PPS years.

Two-person zero-sum game theory deals with situations that are perfectly competitive there are exactly two decision makers for whom there is no possibility of cooperation or compromise. It is the most fundamental part of game theory, and the part most commonly applied. There are diverse applications to military battles, sports, parlor games, economics and politics. The theory was born in World War II, and has by now matured into a significant and tractable body of knowledge about competitive decision making. The advent of modern, powerful computers has enabled the solution of many games that were once beyond computational reach.

"Two-Person Zero-Sum Games, 4th Ed." offers an up-to-date introduction to the subject, especially its computational aspects. Any finite game can be solved by the brute force method of enumerating all possible strategies and then applying linear programming. The trouble is that many interesting games have far too many strategies to enumerate, even with the aid of computers. After introducing ideas, terminology, and the brute force method in the initial chapters, the rest of the book is devoted to classes of games that can be solved without enumerating every strategy. Numerous examples are given, as well as an extensive set of exercises. Many of the exercises are keyed to sheets of an included Excel workbook that can be freely downloaded from the SpringerExtras website. This new edition can be used as either a reference book or as a textbook."