This volume collects contributions from the talks given at the Game Theory and Management Conference held in St. Petersburg, Russia, in June 2017. It covers a wide spectrum of topics, among which are: game theory and management applications in fields such as: strategic management, industrial organization, marketing, operations and supply chain management, public management, financial management, human resources, energy and resource management, and others; cooperative games; dynamic games; evolutionary games; stochastic games.

This book examines the economics of natural resource markets and pricing, as well as the field of natural resource economics in general. It presents the key contributions to this field of research, including the pioneering works and contemporary studies. The book highlights the basic principles and ideas underlying theoretical models of resource pricing. The models considered in the book underline the fundamental determinants of resource prices and the economic nature of rents for non-renewable and renewable resources. Besides the classical theory of exhaustible resource economics, the book includes several issues that are of high importance for global economic growth, such as the transition to alternative energy and the economics of climate change. The authors also consider the issues of commodity pricing and a resource cartel's activity that are relevant to the world oil market. The book provides analytical solutions illustrated with numerical examples. It allows an intuitive understanding of the subject and the model inferences through graphical illustrations and an informal introduction. It, therefore, is a must-read for everybody interested in a better understanding of resource prices, resource markets, and resource economics.

This book covers not only foundational materials but also the most recent progresses made during the past few years on the area of machine learning algorithms. In spite of the intensive research and development in this area, there does not exist a systematic treatment to introduce the fundamental concepts and recent progresses on machine learning algorithms, especially on those based on stochastic optimization methods, randomized algorithms, nonconvex optimization, distributed and online learning, and projection free methods. This book will benefit the broad audience in the area of machine learning, artificial intelligence and mathematical programming community by presenting these recent developments in a tutorial style, starting from the basic building blocks to the most carefully designed and complicated algorithms for machine learning.

This book demonstrates what kind of problems, originating in a management accounting setting, may be solved with game theoretic models. Game theory has experienced growing interest and numerous applications in the field of management accounting. The main focus traditionally has been on the field of non-cooperative behaviour, but the area of cooperative game theory has developed rapidly and has received increasing attention. Intensive research, in combination with the changing culture of publishing, has produced a nearly unmanageable number of publications in the areas concerned. Therefore, one main purpose of this volume is providing an intensive analysis of the intersection of these areas. In addition, the book strengthens the relationship between the theory and the practical applications and it illustrates the two-sided relationship between game theory and management accounting: new game theoretic models offer new fields of applications and these applications raise new questions for the theory.

This book is devoted to the study of classes of optimal control problems arising in economic growth theory, related to the Robinson-Solow-Srinivasan (RSS) model. The model was introduced in the 1960s by economists Joan Robinson, Robert Solow, and Thirukodikaval Nilakanta Srinivasan and was further studied by Robinson, Nobuo Okishio, and Joseph Stiglitz. Since then, the study of the RSS model has become an important element of economic dynamics. In this book, two large general classes of optimal control problems, both of them containing the RSS model as a particular case, are presented for study. For these two classes, a turnpike theory is developed and the existence of solutions to the corresponding infinite horizon optimal control problems is established. The book contains 9 chapters. Chapter 1 discusses turnpike properties for some optimal control problems that are known in the literature, including problems corresponding to the RSS model. The first class of optimal control problems is studied in Chaps. 2-6. In Chap. 2, infinite horizon optimal control problems with nonautonomous optimality criteria are considered. The utility functions, which determine the optimality criterion, are nonconcave. This class of models contains the RSS model as a particular case. The stability of the turnpike phenomenon of the one-dimensional nonautonomous concave RSS model is analyzed in Chap. 3. The following chapter takes up the study of a class of autonomous nonconcave optimal control problems, a subclass of problems considered in Chap. 2. The equivalence of the turnpike property and the asymptotic turnpike property, as well as the stability of the turnpike phenomenon, is established. Turnpike conditions and the stability of the turnpike phenomenon for nonautonomous problems are examined in Chap. 5, with Chap. 6 devoted to the study of the turnpike properties for the one-dimensional nonautonomous nonconcave RSS model. The utility functions, which determine the optimality criterion, are nonconcave. The class of RSS models is identified with a complete metric space of utility functions. Using the Baire category approach, the turnpike phenomenon is shown to hold for most of the models. Chapter 7 begins the study of the second large class of autonomous optimal control problems, and turnpike conditions are established. The stability of the turnpike phenomenon for this class of problems is investigated further in Chaps. 8 and 9.

With the diversification of Internet services and the increase in mobile users, efficient management of network resources has become an extremely important issue in the field of wireless communication networks (WCNs). Adaptive resource management is an effective tool for improving the economic efficiency of WCN systems as well as network design and construction, especially in view of the surge in mobile device demands. This book presents modelling methods based on queueing theory and Markov processes for a wide variety of WCN systems, as well as precise and approximate analytical solution methods for the numerical evaluation of the system performance. This is the first book to provide an overview of the numerical analyses that can be gleaned by applying queueing theory, traffic theory and other analytical methods to various WCN systems. It also discusses the recent advances in the resource management of WCNs, such as broadband wireless access networks, cognitive radio networks, and green cloud computing. It assumes a basic understanding of computer networks and queueing theory, and familiarity with stochastic processes is also recommended. The analysis methods presented in this book are useful for first-year-graduate or senior computer science and communication engineering students. Providing information on network design and management, performance evaluation, queueing theory, game theory, intelligent optimization, and operations research for researchers and engineers, the book is also a valuable reference resource for students, analysts, managers and anyone in the industry interested in WCN system modelling, performance analysis and numerical evaluation.

The 5th edition of this classic textbook covers the central concepts of practical optimization techniques, with an emphasis on methods that are both state-of-the-art and popular. One major insight is the connection between the purely analytical character of an optimization problem and the behavior of algorithms used to solve that problem. End-of-chapter exercises are provided for all chapters. The material is organized into three separate parts. Part I offers a self-contained introduction to linear programming. The presentation in this part is fairly conventional, covering the main elements of the underlying theory of linear programming, many of the most effective numerical algorithms, and many of its important special applications. Part II, which is independent of Part I, covers the theory of unconstrained optimization, including both derivations of the appropriate optimality conditions and an introduction to basic algorithms. This part of the book explores the general properties of algorithms and defines various notions of convergence. In turn, Part III extends the concepts developed in the second part to constrained optimization problems. Except for a few isolated sections, this part is also independent of Part I. As such, Parts II and III can easily be used without reading Part I and, in fact, the book has been used in this way at many universities. New to this edition are popular topics in data science and machine learning, such as the Markov Decision Process, Farkas' lemma, convergence speed analysis, duality theories and applications, various first-order methods, stochastic gradient method, mirror-descent method, Frank-Wolf method, ALM/ADMM method, interior trust-region method for non-convex optimization, distributionally robust optimization, online linear programming, semidefinite programming for sensor-network localization, and infeasibility detection for nonlinear optimization.

Optimization is a field important in its own right but is also integral to numerous applied sciences, including operations research, management science, economics, finance and all branches of mathematics-oriented engineering. Constrained optimization models are one of the most widely used mathematical models in operations research and management science.

This book gives a modern and well-balanced presentation of the subject, focusing on theory but also including algorithims and examples from various real-world applications. The text is easy to read and accessible to anyone with a knowledge of multi-dimensional calculus, linear algebra and basic numerical methods. Detailed examples and counter-examples are provided--as are exercises, solutions and helpful hints, and Matlab/Maple supplements.

The intended readership is advanced undergraduates, graduates, and professionals in any of the applied fields.

DEA is computational at its core and this book will be one of several books that we will look to publish on the computational aspects of DEA. This book by Zhu and Cook will deal with the micro aspects of handling and modeling data issues in modeling DEA problems. DEA's use has grown with its capability of dealing with complex service industry and the public service domain types of problems that require modeling both qualitative and quantitative data. This will be a handbook treatment dealing with specific data problems including the following: (1) imprecise data, (2) inaccurate data, (3) missing data, (4) qualitative data, (5) outliers, (6) undesirable outputs, (7) quality data, (8) statistical analysis, (9) software and other data aspects of modeling complex DEA problems. In addition, the book will demonstrate how to visualize DEA results when the data is more than 3-dimensional, and how to identify efficiency units quickly and accurately.

Constraint Programming is a problem-solving paradigm that establishes a clear distinction between two pivotal aspects of a problem: (1) a precise definition of the constraints that define the problem to be solved and (2) the algorithms and heuristics enabling the selection of decisions to solve the problem. It is because of these capabilities that Constraint Programming is increasingly being employed as a problem-solving tool to solve scheduling problems. Hence the development of Constraint-Based Scheduling as a field of study. The aim of this book is to provide an overview of the most widely used Constraint-Based Scheduling techniques. Following the principles of Constraint Programming, the book consists of three distinct parts: The first chapter introduces the basic principles of Constraint Programming and provides a model of the constraints that are the most often encountered in scheduling problems. Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 are focused on the propagation of resource constraints, which usually are responsible for the "hardness" of the scheduling problem. Chapters 6, 7, and 8 are dedicated to the resolution of several scheduling problems. These examples illustrate the use and the practical efficiency of the constraint propagation methods of the previous chapters. They also show that besides constraint propagation, the exploration of the search space must be carefully designed, taking into account specific properties of the considered problem (e.g., dominance relations, symmetries, possible use of decomposition rules). Chapter 9 mentions various extensions of the model and presents promising research directions.

This new 4th edition offers an introduction to optimal control theory and its diverse applications in management science and economics. It introduces students to the concept of the maximum principle in continuous (as well as discrete) time by combining dynamic programming and Kuhn-Tucker theory. While some mathematical background is needed, the emphasis of the book is not on mathematical rigor, but on modeling realistic situations encountered in business and economics. It applies optimal control theory to the functional areas of management including finance, production and marketing, as well as the economics of growth and of natural resources. In addition, it features material on stochastic Nash and Stackelberg differential games and an adverse selection model in the principal-agent framework. Exercises are included in each chapter, while the answers to selected exercises help deepen readers' understanding of the material covered. Also included are appendices of supplementary material on the solution of differential equations, the calculus of variations and its ties to the maximum principle, and special topics including the Kalman filter, certainty equivalence, singular control, a global saddle point theorem, Sethi-Skiba points, and distributed parameter systems. Optimal control methods are used to determine optimal ways to control a dynamic system. The theoretical work in this field serves as the foundation for the book, in which the author applies it to business management problems developed from his own research and classroom instruction. The new edition has been refined and updated, making it a valuable resource for graduate courses on applied optimal control theory, but also for financial and industrial engineers, economists, and operational researchers interested in applying dynamic optimization in their fields.

Inverse eigenvalue problems arise in a remarkable variety of applications and associated with any inverse eigenvalue problem are two fundamental questions-the theoretic issue on solvability and the practical issue on computability. Both questions are difficult and challenging. In this text, the authors discuss the fundamental questions, some known results, many applications, mathematical properties, a variety of numerical techniques as well as several open problems. This is the first book in the authoritative Numerical Mathematics and Scientific Computation series to cover numerical linear algebra, a broad area of numerical analysis. Authored by two world-renowned researchers, this book is aimed at graduates and researchers in applied mathematics, engineering and computer science and makes an ideal graduate text.

Does game theory ? the mathematical theory of strategic interaction ? provide genuine explanations of human behaviour? Can game theory be used in economic consultancy or other normative contexts? Explaining Games: The Epistemic Programme in Game Theory ? the first monograph on the philosophy of game theory ? is a bold attempt to combine insights from epistemic logic and the philosophy of science to investigate the applicability of game theory in such fields as economics, philosophy and strategic consultancy. De Bruin proves new mathematical theorems about the beliefs, desires and rationality principles of individual human beings, and he explores in detail the logical form of game theory as it is used in explanatory and normative contexts. He argues that game theory reduces to rational choice theory if used as an explanatory device, and that game theory is nonsensical if used as a normative device. A provocative account of the history of game theory reveals that this is not bad news for all of game theory, though. Two central research programmes in game theory tried to find the ultimate characterisation of strategic interaction between rational agents. Yet, while the Nash Equilibrium Refinement Programme has done badly thanks to such research habits as overmathematisation, model-tinkering and introversion, the Epistemic Programme, De Bruin argues, has been rather successful in achieving this aim.

This volume contains the edited texts of the lectures presented at the Workshop on Nonlinear Optimization held in Erice, Sicily, at the "G. Stampacchia" School of Mathematics of the "E. Majorana" Centre for Scientific Culture, June 23 -July 2, 1998. In the tradition of these meetings, the main purpose was to review and discuss recent advances and promising research trends concerning theory, algorithms and innovative applications in the field of Nonlinear Optimization, and of related topics such as Convex Optimization, Nonsmooth Optimization, Variational Inequalities and Complementarity Problems. The meeting was attended by 83 people from 21 countries. Besides the lectures, several formal and informal discussions took place. The result was a wide and deep knowledge of the present research tendencies in the field. We wish to express our appreciation for the active contribution of all the par ticipants in the meeting. Our gratitude is due to the Ettore Majorana Centre in Erice, which offered its facilities and rewarding environment: its staff was certainly instrumental for the success of the meeting. Our gratitude is also due to Francisco Facchinei and Massimo Roma for the effort and time devoted as members of the Organising Committee. We are indebted to the Italian National Research Council, and in particular to the Group on Functional Analysis and its Applications and to the Committees on Engineering Sciences and on Information Sciences and Technolo gies for their financial support. Finally, we address our thanks to Kluwer Academic Publishers for having offered to publish this volume."

This handbook aims to serve as a one-stop, reliable source of reference, with curations of survey and expository contributions on the state-of-the-art in Blockchain technology. It covers a comprehensive range of topics, providing the technical and non-technical reader with fundamentals, applications, and deep details on a variety of topics. The readership is expected to span broadly from technologically-minded business professionals and entrepreneurs, to students, instructors, novices and seasoned researchers, in computer science, engineering, software engineering, finance, and data science. Though Blockchain technology is relatively young, its evolution as a field and a practice is booming in growth and its importance to society had never been more important than it is today. Blockchain solutions enable a decentralization of a digital society where people can contribute, collaborate, and transact without having to second-guess the trust and transparency factors with many geographical, financial, and political barriers removed. It is the distributed ledger technology behind the success of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and many emerging applications. The resource is divided into 5 parts. Part 1 (Foundation) walks the reader through a comprehensive set of essential concepts, protocols, and algorithms that lay the foundation for Blockchain. Part 2 (Scalability) focuses on the most pressing challenges of today's blockchain networks in how to keep pace with real-world expectations. Part 3 (Trust and Security) provides detailed coverage on the issues of trust, reputation, and security in Blockchain. Part 4 (Decentralized Finance) is devoted to a high-impact application of Blockchain to finance, the sector that has most benefitted from this technology. Part 5 (Application and Policy) includes several cases where Blockchain applies to the real world.

Steps forward in mathematics often reverberate in other scientific disciplines, and give rise to innovative conceptual developments or find surprising technological applications. This volume brings to the forefront some of the proponents of the mathematics of the twentieth century, who have put at our disposal new and powerful instruments for investigating the reality around us. The portraits present people who have impressive charisma and wide-ranging cultural interests, who are passionate about defending the importance of their own research, are sensitive to beauty, and attentive to the social and political problems of their times. What we have sought to document is mathematics' central position in the culture of our day. Space has been made not only for the great mathematicians but also for literary texts, including contributions by two apparent interlopers, Robert Musil and Raymond Queneau, for whom mathematical concepts represented a valuable tool for resolving the struggle between 'soul and precision.'

This is a comprehensive study of various time-dependent scheduling problems in single-, parallel- and dedicated-machine environments. In addition to complexity issues and exact or heuristic algorithms which are typically presented in scheduling books, the author also includes more advanced topics such as matrix methods in time-dependent scheduling, time-dependent scheduling with two criteria and time-dependent two-agent scheduling. The reader should be familiar with the basic notions of calculus, discrete mathematics and combinatorial optimization theory, while the book offers introductory material on theory of algorithms, NP-complete problems, and the basics of scheduling theory. The author includes numerous examples, figures and tables, he presents different classes of algorithms using pseudocode, he completes all chapters with extensive bibliographies, and he closes the book with comprehensive symbol and subject indexes. The previous edition of the book focused on computational complexity of time-dependent scheduling problems. In this edition, the author concentrates on models of time-dependent job processing times and algorithms for solving time-dependent scheduling problems. The book is suitable for researchers working on scheduling, problem complexity, optimization, heuristics and local search algorithms.

This book combines, in a novel and general way, an extensive development of the theory of families of commuting matrices with applications to zero-dimensional commutative rings, primary decompositions and polynomial system solving. It integrates the Linear Algebra of the Third Millennium, developed exclusively here, with classical algorithmic and algebraic techniques. Even the experienced reader will be pleasantly surprised to discover new and unexpected aspects in a variety of subjects including eigenvalues and eigenspaces of linear maps, joint eigenspaces of commuting families of endomorphisms, multiplication maps of zero-dimensional affine algebras, computation of primary decompositions and maximal ideals, and solution of polynomial systems. This book completes a trilogy initiated by the uncharacteristically witty books Computational Commutative Algebra 1 and 2 by the same authors. The material treated here is not available in book form, and much of it is not available at all. The authors continue to present it in their lively and humorous style, interspersing core content with funny quotations and tongue-in-cheek explanations.

This book provides a postgraduate audience the keys they need to understand and further develop a set of tools for the efficient computation of lower bounds and valid inequalities in integer programs and combinatorial optimization problems. After discussing the classical approaches described in the literature, the book addresses how to extend these tools to other non-standard formulations that may be applied to a broad set of applications. Examples are provided to illustrate the underlying concepts and to pave the way for future contributions.

Machine learning heavily relies on optimization algorithms to solve its learning models. Constrained problems constitute a major type of optimization problem, and the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is a commonly used algorithm to solve constrained problems, especially linearly constrained ones. Written by experts in machine learning and optimization, this is the first book providing a state-of-the-art review on ADMM under various scenarios, including deterministic and convex optimization, nonconvex optimization, stochastic optimization, and distributed optimization. Offering a rich blend of ideas, theories and proofs, the book is up-to-date and self-contained. It is an excellent reference book for users who are seeking a relatively universal algorithm for constrained problems. Graduate students or researchers can read it to grasp the frontiers of ADMM in machine learning in a short period of time.

This book provides energy efficiency quantitative analysis and optimal methods for discrete manufacturing systems from the perspective of global optimization. In order to analyze and optimize energy efficiency for discrete manufacturing systems, it uses real-time access to energy consumption information and models of the energy consumption, and constructs an energy efficiency quantitative index system. Based on the rough set and analytic hierarchy process, it also proposes a principal component quantitative analysis and a combined energy efficiency quantitative analysis. In turn, the book addresses the design and development of quantitative analysis systems. To save energy consumption on the basis of energy efficiency analysis, it presents several optimal control strategies, including one for single-machine equipment, an integrated approach based on RWA-MOPSO, and one for production energy efficiency based on a teaching and learning optimal algorithm. Given its scope, the book offers a valuable guide for students, teachers, engineers and researchers in the field of discrete manufacturing systems.

Fundamentals and important results of vector optimization in a general setting are presented in this book. The theory developed includes scalarization, existence theorems, a generalized Lagrange multiplier rule and duality results. Applications to vector approximation, cooperative game theory and multiobjective optimization are described. The theory is extended to set optimization with particular emphasis on contingent epiderivatives, subgradients and optimality conditions. Background material of convex analysis being necessary is concisely summarized at the beginning.

This second edition contains new parts on the adaptive Eichfelder-Polak method, a concrete application to magnetic resonance systems in medical engineering and additional remarks on the contribution of F.Y. Edgeworth and V. Pareto. The bibliography is updated and includes more recent important publications.

This book provides a comprehensive, modern introduction to convex optimization, a field that is becoming increasingly important in applied mathematics, economics and finance, engineering, and computer science, notably in data science and machine learning. Written by a leading expert in the field, this book includes recent advances in the algorithmic theory of convex optimization, naturally complementing the existing literature. It contains a unified and rigorous presentation of the acceleration techniques for minimization schemes of first- and second-order. It provides readers with a full treatment of the smoothing technique, which has tremendously extended the abilities of gradient-type methods. Several powerful approaches in structural optimization, including optimization in relative scale and polynomial-time interior-point methods, are also discussed in detail. Researchers in theoretical optimization as well as professionals working on optimization problems will find this book very useful. It presents many successful examples of how to develop very fast specialized minimization algorithms. Based on the author's lectures, it can naturally serve as the basis for introductory and advanced courses in convex optimization for students in engineering, economics, computer science and mathematics.

This book serves as an introductory text to optimization theory in normed spaces and covers all areas of nonlinear optimization. It presents fundamentals with particular emphasis on the application to problems in the calculus of variations, approximation and optimal control theory. The reader is expected to have a basic knowledge of linear functional analysis.

Durable strategies that have prolonged effects are prevalent in real-world situations. Revenue-generating investments, toxic waste disposal, long-lived goods, regulatory measures, coalition agreements, diffusion of knowledge, advertisement and investments to accumulate physical capital are concrete and common examples of durable strategies. This book provides an augmentation of dynamic game theory and advances a new game paradigm with durable strategies in decision-making schemes. It covers theories, solution techniques, and the applications of a general class of dynamic games with multiple durable strategies. Non-cooperative equilibria and cooperative solutions are derived, along with advanced topics including random termination, asynchronous game horizons, and stochastic analysis. The techniques presented here will enable readers to solve numerous practical dynamic interactive problems with durable strategies. This book not only expands the scope of applied dynamic game theory, but also provides a solid foundation for further theoretical and technical advancements. As such, it will appeal to scholars and students of quantitative economics, game theory, operations research, and computational mathematics. "Not too many new concepts have been introduced in dynamic games since their inception. The introduction of the concept of durable strategies changes this trend and yields important contributions to environmental and business applications." Dusan M Stipanovic, Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign "Before this book, the field simply did not realize that most of our strategies are durable and entail profound effects in the future. Putting them into the mathematical framework of dynamic games is a great innovative effort." Vladimir Turetsky, Professor, Ort Braude College "Durable-strategies Dynamic Games is truly a world-leading addition to the field of dynamic games. It is a much needed publication to tackle increasingly crucial problems under the reality of durable strategies." Vladimir Mazalov, Director of Mathematical Research, Russian Academy of Sciences & President of the International Society of Dynamic Games