This book discusses how to build optimization tools able to generate better future studies. It aims at showing how these tools can be used to develop an adaptive learning environment that can be used for decision making in the presence of uncertainties. The book starts with existing fuzzy techniques and multicriteria decision making approaches and shows how to combine them in more effective tools to model future events and take therefore better decisions. The first part of the book is dedicated to the theories behind fuzzy optimization and fuzzy cognitive map, while the second part presents new approaches developed by the authors with their practical application to trend impact analysis, scenario planning and strategic formulation. The book is aimed at two groups of readers, interested in linking the future studies with artificial intelligence. The first group includes social scientists seeking for improved methods for strategic prospective. The second group includes computer scientists and engineers seeking for new applications and current developments of Soft Computing methods for forecasting in social science, but not limited to this.

Uncertain Futures considers how economic actors visualize the future and decide how to act in conditions of radical uncertainty. It starts from the premise that dynamic capitalist economies are characterized by relentless innovation and novelty and hence exhibit an indeterminacy that cannot be reduced to measurable risk. The organizing question then becomes how economic actors form expectations and make decisions despite the uncertainty they face. This edited volume lays the foundations for a new model of economic reasoning by showing how, in conditions of uncertainty, economic actors combine calculation with imaginaries and narratives to form fictional expectations that coordinate action and provide the confidence to act. It draws on groundbreaking research in economic sociology, economics, anthropology, and psychology to present theoretically grounded empirical case studies. These demonstrate how grand narratives, central bank forward guidance, economic forecasts, finance models, business plans, visions of technological futures, and new era stories influence behaviour and become instruments of power in markets and societies. The market impact of shared calculative devices, social narratives, and contingent imaginaries underlines the rationale for a new form of narrative economics.