Category: Computers & Technology

Book Summary :

As a text for an undergraduate mathematics course for nonmajors, Mathematics and Politics requires no prerequisites in either area while the underlying philosophy involves minimizing algebraic computations and focusing instead on some conceptual aspects of mathematics in the context of important real-world questions in political science. Five major topics are covered including a model of escalation, game theoretic models of international conflict, yes-no voting systems, political power, and social choice. Each topic is discussed in an introductory chapter and revisited in more depth in a later chapter. This new edition has added co-author, Allison Pacelli, and two new chapters on "Fairness" and "More Fairness." The examples and the exercises have been updated and enhanced throughout. Reviews from first edition: This book is well written and has much math of interest. While it is pitched at a non-math audience there is material here that will be new and interesting to the readers... -Sigact News For mathematicians, Taylor's book shows how the social sciences make use of mathematical thinking, in the form of axiomatic systems, and offers a chance to teach this kind of thinking to our students. - The College Mathematics Journal The writing is crisp and the sense of excitement about learning mathematics is seductive. The political conflict examples are well thought out and clear. -Michael C. Munger

Book Summary :

General equilibrium In this book we try to cope with the challenging task of reviewing the so called general equilibrium model and of discussing one specific aspect of the approach underlying it, namely, market completeness. With the denomination "general equilibrium" (from now on in short GE) we shall mainly refer to two different things. On one hand, in particular when using the expression "GE approach", we shall refer to a long established methodolog ical tradition in building and developing economic models, which includes, as of today, an enormous amount of contributions, ranging in number by several 1 thousands • On the other hand, in particular when using the expression "stan dard differentiable GE model", we refer to a very specific version of economic model of exchange and production, to be presented in Chapters 8 and 9, and to be modified in Chapters 10 to 15. Such a version is certainly formulated within the GE approach, but it is generated by making several quite restrictive 2 assumptions • Even to list and review very shortly all the collective work which can be ascribed to the GE approach would be a formidable task for several coauthors in a lifetime perspective. The book instead intends to address just a single issue. Before providing an illustration of its main topic, we feel the obligation to say a word on the controversial character of GE. First of all, we should say that we identify the GE approach as being based 3 on three principles .

Book Summary :

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. The editorial board of this series comprises the following prominent economists and mathematicians: Managing Editors: S. Kusuoka (Univ. Tokyo), T. Maruyama (Keio Univ.). Editors: R. Anderson (U.C. Berkeley), C. Castaing (Univ. Montpellier), F.H. Clarke (Univ. Lyon I), G. Debreu (U.C. Berkeley), E. Dierker (Univ. Vienna), D. Duffie (Stanford Univ.), L.C. Evans (U.C. Berkeley), T. Fujimoto (Okayama Univ.), J.-M. Grandmont (CREST-CNRS), N. Hirano (Yokohama National Univ.), L. Hurwicz (Univ. of Minnesota), T. Ichiishi (Ohio State Univ.), A. Ioffe (Israel Institute of Technology), S. Iwamoto (Kyushu Univ.), K. Kamiya (Univ. Tokyo), K. Kawamata (Keio Univ.), N. Kikuchi (Keio Univ.), H. Matano (Univ. Tokyo), K. Nishimura (Kyoto Univ.), M.K. Richter (Univ. Minnesota), Y. Takahashi (Kyoto Univ.), M. Valadier (Univ. Montpellier II), A. Yamaguti (Kyoto Univ./Ryukoku Univ.), M. Yano (Keio Univ.).

Book Summary :

This book provides an introduction to the models, methods, and results of some rescheduling problems in the presence of unexpected disruption events, including job unavailability, arrival of new jobs, and machine breakdown. The occurrence of these unexpected disruptions may cause a change in the planned schedule, which may render the originally feasible schedule infeasible. Rescheduling, which involves adjusting the original schedule to account for a disruption, is necessary in order to minimize the effects of the disruption on the performance of the system. This involves a trade-off between finding a cost-effective new schedule and avoiding excessive changes to the original schedule. This book views scheduling theory as practical theory, and it has made sure to emphasize the practical aspects of its topic coverage. Thus, this book considers some scenarios existing in most real-world environments, such as preventive machine maintenance, and deteriorating effect where the actual processing time of a job gets longer along with machine’s usage and age. To alleviate the effect of disruption events, some flexible strategies are adopted, including allocation extra resources to reduce job processing times or rejection the production of some jobs. For each considered scenario, depending on the model settings and on the disruption events, this book addresses the complexity, and the design of efficient exact or approximated algorithms. Especially when optimization methods and analytic tools fall short, this book stresses metaheuristics including improved elitist non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm and differential evolution algorithm. This book also provides extensive numerical studies to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms. The problem of rescheduling in the presence of unexpected disruption events is of great importance for the successful implementation of real-world scheduling systems. There is now an astounding body of knowledge in this field. This book is the first monograph on rescheduling. It aims at introducing the author's research achievements in rescheduling. It is written for researchers and Ph.D. students working in scheduling theory and other members of scientific community who are interested in recent scheduling models. Our goal is to enable the reader to know about some new achievements on this topic.

Book Summary :

This book examines the pattern of growth of the Spanish economy in the last few decades, and studies the causes of its labour productivity, and the special features characterising business cycles in Spain.

Book Summary :

This book develops a machine-learning framework for predicting economic growth. It can also be considered as a primer for using machine learning (also known as data mining or data analytics) to answer economic questions. While machine learning itself is not a new idea, advances in computing technology combined with a dawning realization of its applicability to economic questions makes it a new tool for economists.

Book Summary :

Cross-disciplinary research on how computer-assisted decision making can be supported by sophisticated data analysis techniques and recent developments in knowledge-based systems research are described in this volume, with emphasis on marketing applications. Aspects dealt with include market-share analysis (spreadsheet based), media planning, stochastic market modelling, marketing data analysis and new product introduction management (all knowledge-based, partly using PROLOG). These contributions emphasize links between decision support, expert knowledge research and marketing. Other application areas are debt and credit management and personnel disposition (KEE based), portfolio management (PROLOG based) and vehicle scheduling. Concrete interconnections between data analysis and marketing can be seen in the contributions on classification and unfolding of market data, market segmentation by forced classification, conjoint analysis applications, ideal point product mapping, MDS in telecommunications pricing and multi-mode marketing data evaluations.

Book Summary :

This book presents an original empirical investigation of the market structure of airline city pair markets, shedding new light on the workings of competitive processes between firms. Examining a cross-section of US airline city pairs, Tabacco proposes for the first time that the industry can be understood as a natural oligopoly, each airline market being dominated by one to three airline carriers regardless of market size. The author questions the extent to which airlines deliberately prevent head-to-head competition within city pair markets, and draws intriguing conclusions about competitive forces from the observed market structure. Uncovering some of the main corporate strategies of the airline industry, the book is of immediate relevance to industry managers and practitioners, as well as academic economists.

Book Summary :

This book describes the modelling of prices of ?nancial assets in a simple d- crete time, discrete state, binomial framework. By avoiding the mathematical technicalitiesofcontinuoustime?nancewehopewehavemadethematerial accessible to a wide audience. Some of the developments and formulae appear here for the ?rst time in book form. We hope our book will appeal to various audiences. These include MBA s- dents,upperlevelundergraduatestudents,beginningdoctoralstudents,qu- titative analysts at a basic level and senior executives who seek material on new developments in ?nance at an accessible level. The basic building block in our book is the one-step binomial model where a known price today can take one of two possible values at a future time, which might, for example, be tomorrow, or next month, or next year. In this simple situation “risk neutral pricing” can be de?ned and the model can be applied to price forward contracts, exchange rate contracts and interest rate derivatives. In a few places we discuss multinomial models to explain the notions of incomplete markets and how pricing can be viewed in such a context, where unique prices are no longer available. The simple one-period framework can then be extended to multi-period m- els.TheCox-Ross-RubinsteinapproximationtotheBlackScholesoptionpr- ing formula is an immediate consequence. American, barrier and exotic - tions can all be discussed and priced using binomial models. More precise modelling issues such as implied volatility trees and implied binomial trees are treated, as well as interest rate models like those due to Ho and Lee; and Black, Derman and Toy.

Book Summary :

This important textbook has been revised and updated to continue its focus on the link between ethics and economic policy analysis, whilst ensuring that perspectives addressing the moral limits of the market, latest behavioural economics literature, and the changes in inequality over the years are included. Basic philosophical concepts are systematically described, followed by conventional welfare economic theory and policy, and applications to some topical economic problems such as income distribution and sustainable development.

Book Summary :

This edited collection addresses the major issues encountered in the calculation of economic damages to individuals in civil litigation. In federal and state courts in the United States, as well as in other nations, when one party sues another, the suing party is required not only to prove that the harm was, indeed, caused by the other party, but also to claim and demonstrate that a specified dollar value represents just compensation for the harm. Forensic economists are often called upon to evaluate, measure, and opine on the degree of economic loss that is alleged to have occurred. Aimed at both practitioners and theorists, the original articles and essays in the edited collection are written by nationally recognized and widely published forensic experts. Its strength is in showcasing theories, methods, and measurements as they differ in a variety of cases, and in its review of the forensic economics literature developed over the past thirty years. Readers will find informative discussions of topics such as establishing earnings capacity for both adults and infants, worklife probability, personal consumption deductions, taxation as treated in federal and state courts, valuing fringe benefits, discounting theory and practice, the effects of the Affordable Care Act, the valuation of personal services, wrongful discharge, hedonics, effective communication by the expert witness, and ethical issues. The volume also covers surveys of the views of practicing forensic economists, the connection between law and forensic economics, alternatives to litigation in the form of VCF-like schedules, and key differences among nations in measuring economic damages.

Book Summary :

The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) has been one of the foremost mathematical methods for decision making with multiple criteria and has been widely studied in the operations research literature as well as applied to solve countless real-world problems. This book is meant to introduce and strengthen the readers’ knowledge of the AHP, no matter how familiar they may be with the topic. This book provides a concise, yet self-contained, introduction to the AHP that uses a novel and more pedagogical approach. It begins with an introduction to the principles of the AHP, covering the critical points of the method, as well as some of its applications. Next, the book explores further aspects of the method, including the derivation of the priority vector, the estimation of inconsistency, and the use of AHP for group decisions. Each of these is introduced by relaxing initial assumptions. Furthermore, this booklet covers extensions of AHP, which are typically neglected in elementary expositions of the methods. Such extensions concern different numerical representations of preferences and the interval and fuzzy representations of preferences to account for uncertainty. During the whole exposition, an eye is kept on the most recent developments of the method.