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 is a collection of certain lectures given at the Economics Department at Stanford University on the game theory. It contains material on this theory of rational behavior of people with nonidentical interests whose area of application includes economics, politics, and war.

Human behavior often violates the predictions of rational choice theory. This realization has caused many social psychologists and experimental economists to attempt to develop an experimentally-based variant of game theory as an alternative descriptive model. The impetus for this book is the interest in the development of such a theory that combines elements from both disciplines and appeals to both.
The editors have brought together leading researchers in the fields of experimental economics, behavioral game theory, and social dilemmas to engage in constructive dialogue across disciplinary boundaries. This book offers a comprehensive overview of the new insights into the motivation of human behavior under a variety of naturally or artificially induced incentive structures that are emerging from their work. Amnon Rapoport--a pioneer and leader in experimental study and quantitative modeling of human decisions in social and interactive contexts--is honored.

Stochastic differential games represent one of the most complex forms of decision making under uncertainty. In particular, interactions between strategic behaviors, dynamic evolution and stochastic elements have to be considered simultaneously. The complexity of stochastic differential games generally leads to great difficulties in the derivation of solutions. Cooperative games hold out the promise of more socially optimal and group efficient solutions to problems involving strategic actions. Despite urgent calls for national and international cooperation, the absence of formal solutions has precluded rigorous analysis of this problem.

The book supplies effective tools for rigorous study of cooperative stochastic differential games. In particular, a generalized theorem for the derivation of analytically tractable "payoff distribution procedure" of subgame consistent solution is presented. Being capable of deriving analytical tractable solutions, the work is not only theoretically interesting but would enable the hitherto intractable problems in cooperative stochastic differential games to be fruitfully explored.

Currently, this book is the first ever volume devoted to cooperative stochastic differential games. It aims to provide its readers an effective tool to analyze cooperative arrangements of conflict situations with uncertainty over time. Cooperative game theory has succeeded in offering many applications of game theory in operations research, management, economics, politics and other disciplines. The extension of these applications to a dynamic environment with stochastic elements should be fruitful. The book will be of interest to game theorists, mathematicians, economists, policy-makers, corporate planners and graduate students.

The genre of adventure games is frequently overlooked. Lacking the constantly-evolving graphics and graphic violence of their counterparts in first-person and third-person shooters or role-playing games, they are often marketed to and beloved by players outside of mainstream game communities. While often forgotten by both the industry and academia, adventure games have had (and continue to have) a surprisingly wide influence on contemporary games, in categories including walking simulators, hidden object games, visual novels, and bestselling titles from companies like Telltale and Campo Santo. In this examination of heirs to the genre's legacy, the authors examine the genre from multiple perspectives, connecting technical analysis with critical commentary and social context. This will be the first book to consider this important genre from a comprehensive and transdisciplinary perspective. Drawing upon methods from platform studies, software studies, media studies, and literary studies, they reveal the genre's ludic and narrative origins and patterns, where character (and the player's embodiment of a character) is essential to the experience of play and the choices within a game. A deep structural analysis of adventure games also uncovers an unsteady balance between sometimes contradictory elements of story, exploration, and puzzles: with different games and creators employing a multitude of different solutions to resolving this tension.

The Unpredictability of Gameplay explores the many forms of unpredictability in games and proposes a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding and categorizing non-deterministic game mechanics. Rather than viewing all game mechanics with unpredictable outcomes as a single concept, Mark R. Johnson develops a three-part typology for such mechanics, distinguishing between randomness, chance, and luck in gameplay, assessing games that range from grand strategy and MMORPGs to slot machines and card games. He also explores forms of unanticipated unpredictability, where elements of games fail to function as intended and create new forms of gameplay in the process. Covering a range of game concepts using these frameworks, The Unpredictability of Gameplay then explores three illustrative case studies: 1) procedural generation, 2) replay value and grinding, and 3) player-made practices designed to reduce the level of luck in non-deterministic games. Throughout, Johnson demonstrates the importance of looking more deeply at unpredictability in games and game design and the various ways in which unpredictability manifests while offering an invaluable tool for game scholars and game designers seeking to integrate unpredictability into their work.

This volume features recent development and techniques in evolution equations by renown experts in the field. Each contribution emphasizes the relevance and depth of this important area of mathematics and its expanding reach into the physical, biological, social, and computational sciences as well as into engineering and technology. The reader will find an accessible summary of a wide range of active research topics, along with exciting new results. Topics include: Impulsive implicit Caputo fractional q-difference equations in finite and infinite dimensional Banach spaces; optimal control of averaged state of a population dynamic model; structural stability of nonlinear elliptic p(u)-Laplacian problem with Robin-type boundary condition; exponential dichotomy and partial neutral functional differential equations, stable and center-stable manifolds of admissible class; global attractor in Alpha-norm for some partial functional differential equations of neutral and retarded type; and more. Researchers in mathematical sciences, biosciences, computational sciences and related fields, will benefit from the rich and useful resources provided. Upper undergraduate and graduate students may be inspired to contribute to this active and stimulating field.

This book covers the issues related to optimization of engineering and management problems using soft computing techniques with an industrial outlook. It covers a broad area related to real life complex decision making problems using a heuristics approach. It also explores a wide perspective and future directions in industrial engineering research on a global platform/scenario. The book highlights the concept of optimization, presents various soft computing techniques, offers sample problems, and discusses related software programs complete with illustrations. Features Explains the concept of optimization and relevance to soft computing techniques towards optimal solution in engineering and management Presents various soft computing techniques Offers problems and their optimization using various soft computing techniques Discusses related software programs, with illustrations Provides a step-by-step tutorial on how to handle relevant software for obtaining the optimal solution to various engineering problems

This book covers a large spectrum of cutting-edge game theory applications in management science in which Professor Georges Zaccour has made significant contributions. The book consists of 21 chapters and highlights the latest treatments of game theory in various areas, including marketing, supply chains, energy and environmental management, and cyber defense. With this book, former Ph.D. students and successful research collaborators of Professor Zaccour wish to honor his many scientific achievements.

This book is an authoritative collection of contributions in the field of soft-computing. Based on selected works presented at the 6th World Conference on Soft Computing, held on May 22-25, 2016, in Berkeley, USA, it describes new theoretical advances, as well as cutting-edge methods and applications. Theories cover a wealth of topics, such as fuzzy logic, cognitive modeling, Bayesian and probabilistic methods, multi-criteria decision making, utility theory, approximate reasoning, human-centric computing and many others. Applications concerns a number of fields, such as internet and semantic web, social networks and trust, control and robotics, computer vision, medicine and bioinformatics, as well as finance, security and e-Commerce, among others. Dedicated to the 50th Anniversary of Fuzzy Logic and to the 95th Birthday Anniversary of Lotfi A. Zadeh, the book not only offers a timely view on the field, yet it also discusses thought-provoking developments and challenges, thus fostering new research directions in the diverse areas of soft computing.

This monograph deals with a general class of solution approaches in deterministic global optimization, namely the geometric branch-and-bound methods which are popular algorithms, for instance, in Lipschitzian optimization, d.c. programming, and interval analysis.It alsointroduces a new concept for the rate of convergence and analyzes several bounding operations reported in the literature, from the theoretical as well as from the empirical point of view. Furthermore, extensions of the prototype algorithm for multicriteria global optimization problems as well as mixed combinatorial optimization problems are considered. Numerical examples based on facility location problems support the theory. Applications of geometric branch-and-bound methods, namely the circle detection problem in image processing, the integrated scheduling and location makespan problem, and the median line location problem in the three-dimensional space are also presented. The book is intended for both researchers and students in the areas of mathematics, operations research, engineering, and computer science.

A lot of economic problems can be formulated as constrained optimizations and equilibration of their solutions. Various mathematical theories have been supplying economists with indispensable machineries for these problems arising in economic theory. Conversely, mathematicians have been stimulated by various mathematical difficulties raised by economic theories. The series is designed to bring together those mathematicians who are seriously interested in getting new challenging stimuli from economic theories with those economists who are seeking effective mathematical tools for their research.

Game Theory--the formal modelling of conflict and cooperation--first emerged as a recognized field with the publication of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern's "Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour" in 1944. Since then, game-theoretic thinking about choice of strategies and the interdependence of people's actions has influenced all the social sciences. However, little is known about the history of the theory of strategic games "prior" to this publication.
In this volume, the history of strategic games--from its origins up to 1945--is traced through the work of 19th Century economists such as Cournot and Edgeworth; voting theorists, including Lewis Carroll; conflict theorists Richardson and Lanchester; probabilists such as Bertrand, Borel, and Ville; and later economists, notably Stackelberg and Zeuthen. This authoritative account of the history of game theory concludes with a historical perspective on the achievement of von Neumann and Morgenstern and an appraisal of the reception of their book.

Discusses replacement, repair, and inspection Offers estimation and statistical tests Covers accelerated life testing Explores warranty analysis manufacturing Includes service reliability

Problems in network optimization arise in all areas of technology and industrial management. The topic of network flows has applications in diverse fields such as chemistry, engineering, management science, scheduling and transportation, to name a few.

This book presents essential concepts of traditional Flower Pollination Algorithm (FPA) and its recent variants and also its application to find optimal solution for a variety of real-world engineering and medical problems. Swarm intelligence-based meta-heuristic algorithms are extensively implemented to solve a variety of real-world optimization problems due to its adaptability and robustness. FPA is one of the most successful swarm intelligence procedures developed in 2012 and extensively used in various optimization tasks for more than a decade. The mathematical model of FPA is quite straightforward and easy to understand and enhance, compared to other swarm approaches. Hence, FPA has attracted attention of researchers, who are working to find the optimal solutions in variety of domains, such as N-dimensional numerical optimization, constrained/unconstrained optimization, and linear/nonlinear optimization problems. Along with the traditional bat algorithm, the enhanced versions of FPA are also considered to solve a variety of optimization problems in science, engineering, and medical applications.

Seeking sparse solutions of underdetermined linear systems is required in many areas of engineering and science such as signal and image processing. The efficient sparse representation becomes central in various big or high-dimensional data processing, yielding fruitful theoretical and realistic results in these fields. The mathematical optimization plays a fundamentally important role in the development of these results and acts as the mainstream numerical algorithms for the sparsity-seeking problems arising from big-data processing, compressed sensing, statistical learning, computer vision, and so on. This has attracted the interest of many researchers at the interface of engineering, mathematics and computer science. Sparse Optimization Theory and Methods presents the state of the art in theory and algorithms for signal recovery under the sparsity assumption. The up-to-date uniqueness conditions for the sparsest solution of underdertemined linear systems are described. The results for sparse signal recovery under the matrix property called range space property (RSP) are introduced, which is a deep and mild condition for the sparse signal to be recovered by convex optimization methods. This framework is generalized to 1-bit compressed sensing, leading to a novel sign recovery theory in this area. Two efficient sparsity-seeking algorithms, reweighted l1-minimization in primal space and the algorithm based on complementary slackness property, are presented. The theoretical efficiency of these algorithms is rigorously analysed in this book. Under the RSP assumption, the author also provides a novel and unified stability analysis for several popular optimization methods for sparse signal recovery, including l1-mininization, Dantzig selector and LASSO. This book incorporates recent development and the author's latest research in the field that have not appeared in other books.

In the quarter of a century since three mathematicians and game theorists collaborated to create Winning Ways for Your Mathematical Plays, the book has become the definitive work on the subject of mathematical games. Now carefully revised and broken down into four volumes to accommodate new developments, the Second Edition retains the original's wealth of wit and wisdom. The authors' insightful strategies, blended with their witty and irreverent style, make reading a profitable pleasure. In Volume 2, the authors have a Change of Heart, bending the rules established in Volume 1 to apply them to games such as Cut-cake and Loopy Hackenbush. From the Table of Contents: - If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em! - Hot Bottles Followed by Cold Wars - Games Infinite and Indefinite - Games Eternal--Games Entailed - Survival in the Lost World

This book presents a comprehensive analysis of tax consequences in an oligopolistic market. It provides the reader with a systematic and precise way of understanding the research content of tax incidence. A major feature of the book is its analysis of tax incidence from both domestic and international oligopolies. Then, by examining various oligopoly models, it approaches the essence of domestic and multilateral tax issues. Starting with the general theory of commodity tax incidence in an oligopoly, the topics addressed in this book include tax reform, environmental regulation, and policy coordination in international oligopolies. In addition to the usual oligopoly model, managerial oligopoly, the public pricing problem for firms in an oligopoly, and mixed oligopoly are dealt with. By presenting individual issues and explaining the relevance of each topic, this book is highly recommended for readers interested in policymaking and the global market in relation to the interdisciplinary developments of public economics, regional economics, and international economics. This book is also valuable as an advanced textbook on applied economics.

This proceedings volume highlights the state-of-the-art knowledge related to optimization, decisions science and problem solving methods, as well as their application in industrial and territorial systems. It includes contributions tackling these themes using models and methods based on continuous and discrete optimization, network optimization, simulation and system dynamics, heuristics, metaheuristics, artificial intelligence, analytics, and also multiple-criteria decision making. The number and the increasing size of the problems arising in real life require mathematical models and solution methods adequate to their complexity. There has also been increasing research interest in Big Data and related challenges. These challenges can be recognized in many fields and systems which have a significant impact on our way of living: design, management and control of industrial production of goods and services; transportation planning and traffic management in urban and regional areas; energy production and exploitation; natural resources and environment protection; homeland security and critical infrastructure protection; development of advanced information and communication technologies. The chapters in this book examine how to deal with new and emerging practical problems arising in these different fields through the presented methodologies and their applications. The chapter topics are applicable for researchers and practitioners working in these areas, but also for the operations research community. The contributions were presented during the international conference "Optimization and Decision Science" (ODS2017), held at Hilton Sorrento Palace Conference Center, Sorrento, Italy, September 4 - 7, 2017. ODS 2017, was organized by AIRO, Italian Operations Research Society, in cooperation with DIETI (Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology) of University "Federico II" of Naples.

The ancient game of Go is one of the less obvious candidates for mathematical analysis. With the development of new concepts in combinatorial game theory, the authors have been able to analyze Go games and find solutions to real endgame problems that have stumped professional Go players. Go players with an interest in mathematics and mathematicians who work in game theory will not want to miss this book because it describes substantial connections between the two subjects that have been, until now, largely unrecognized.

This is the second of three volumes providing a comprehensive presentation of the fundamentals of scientific computing. This volume discusses more advanced topics than volume one, and is largely not a prerequisite for volume three. This book and its companions show how to determine the quality of computational results, and how to measure the relative efficiency of competing methods. Readers learn how to determine the maximum attainable accuracy of algorithms, and how to select the best method for computing problems. This book also discusses programming in several languages, including C++, Fortran and MATLAB. There are 49 examples, 110 exercises, 66 algorithms, 24 interactive JavaScript programs, 77 references to software programs and 1 case study. Topics are introduced with goals, literature references and links to public software. There are descriptions of the current algorithms in LAPACK, GSLIB and MATLAB. This book could be used for a second course in numerical methods, for either upper level undergraduates or first year graduate students. Parts of the text could be used for specialized courses, such as nonlinear optimization or iterative linear algebra.

This classic on games and how to play them intelligently is being re-issued in a new, four volume edition. This book has laid the foundation to a mathematical approach to playing games. The wise authors wield witty words, which wangle wonderfully winning ways. In Volume 1, the authors do the Spade Work, presenting theories and techniques to "dissect" games of varied structures and formats in order to develop winning strategies.

A comprehensive study of the connection game genre, Connection Games provides a survey of known connection games while exploring common themes and strategies. This book aims to impose some structure on this increasingly large family of games, and to define exactly what constitutes a connection game. Key games are examined in detail and complete rules for over 200 connection games and variants are provided. A connection game is a board game in which players vie to develop or complete a specific type of connection with their pieces. This might involve forming a path between two or more goals, completing a closed loop, or gathering all pieces together into a single connected group.

This book describes the development of innovative non-centralized optimization-based control schemes to solve economic dispatch problems of large-scale energy systems. Particularly, it focuses on communication and cooperation processes of local controllers, which are integral parts of such schemes. The economic dispatch problem, which is formulated as a convex optimization problem with edge-based coupling constraints, is solved by using methodologies in distributed optimization over time-varying networks, together with distributed model predictive control, and system partitioning techniques. At first, the book describes two distributed optimization methods, which are iterative and require the local controllers to exchange information with each other at each iteration. In turn, it shows that the sequence produced by these methods converges to an optimal solution when some conditions, which include how the controllers must communicate and cooperate, are satisfied. Further, it proposes an information exchange protocol to cope with possible communication link failures. Finally, the proposed distributed optimization methods are extended to the cases with random communication networks and asynchronous updates. Overall, this book presents a set of improved predictive control and distributed optimization methods, together with a rigorous mathematical analysis of each proposed algorithms. It describes a comprehensive approach to cope with communication and cooperation issues of non-centralized control schemes and show how the improved schemes can be successfully applied to solve the economic dispatch problems of large-scale energy systems.