In this book methods from Operations Research and Game Theory are used to determine companies’ profit-maximizing strategies related to pricing and (cooperative) advertising. It considers different supply chain structures as well as various distributions of power, making it possible to analyze both inter-echelon and intra-echelon dependencies between the companies’ decisions. Additionally, an approach based on fuzzy set theory is presented in order to compensate for incomplete or missing da...

Internet is starting to permeate politics much as it has previously revolutionised education, business or the arts. Thus, there is a growing interest in areas of e-government and, more recently, e-democracy. However, most attempts in this field have just envisioned standard political approaches facilitated by technology, like e-voting or e-debating. Alternatively, we could devise a more transforming strategy based on deploying web based group decision support tools and promote their use fo...

How do people living in small groups without money, markets, police and rigid social classes develop norms of economic and social cooperation that are sustainable over time? This book addresses this fundamental question and explains the origin, structure and spread of stateless societies. Using insights from game theory, ethnography and archaeology, Stanish shows how ritual - broadly defined - is the key. Ritual practices encode elaborate rules of behavior and are ingenious mechanisms of o...

This book is the first in-depth guide to applying the philosophy, theory, and methods of decision analysis to creating and executing winning legal strategies. With explanations that progress from introductory to advanced and practice problems at the end of each chapter, this is a book the reader will want to use and refer to for years to come. Practicing decision analysts, operations research and management science students, attorneys and law students will find this book an invaluable addi...

Risk has become one of the main topics in fields as diverse as engineering, medicine and economics, and it is also studied by social scientists, psychologists and legal scholars. This Springer Essentials version offers an overview of the in-depth handbook and highlights some of the main points covered in the Handbook of Risk Theory. The topic of risk also leads to more fundamental questions such as: What is risk? What can decision theory contribute to the analysis of risk? What does the hu...

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 relation...

This monograph studies voting procedures based on the probability that paradoxical outcomes like the famous Condorcet Paradox might exist. It is well known that hypothetical examples of many different paradoxical election outcomes can be developed, but this analysis examines factors that are related to the process by which voters form their preferences on candidates that will significantly reduce the likelihood that such voting paradoxes will ever actually be observed. It is found that ext...

A major problem arising in airline alliances is to design allocation mechanisms determining how the revenue of a product should be shared among the airlines. The nucleolus is a concept of cooperative game theory that provides solutions for allocating the cost or benefit of a cooperation. This work provides fair revenue proportions for the airline alliances based on the nucleolus, which assumes a centralized decision making system. The proposed mechanism is used as a benchmark to evaluate t...

Set-valued optimization is a vibrant and expanding branch of mathematics that deals with optimization problems where the objective map and/or the constraints maps are set-valued maps acting between certain spaces. Since set-valued maps subsumes single valued maps, set-valued optimization provides an important extension and unification of the scalar as well as the vector optimization problems. Therefore this relatively new discipline has justifiably attracted a great deal of attention in re...

This monograph provides a detailed analysis on fair queueing rules from a normative, a strategic, and a non-cooperative viewpoint. The queueing problem is concerned with the following situation: There is a group of agents who must be served in a facility. The facility can handle only one agent at a time and agents incur waiting costs. The problem is to find the order in which to serve agents and monetary transfers they should receive. The queueing problem has been studied extensively in th...

This volume results from the “Second International Conference on Dynamics of Disasters” held in Kalamata, Greece, June 29-July 2, 2015. The conference covered particular topics involved in natural and man-made disasters such as war, chemical spills, and wildfires. Papers in this volume examine the finer points of disasters through:Critical infrastructure protectionResiliencyHumanitarian logisticRelief supply chains

This book contains the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Modeling and Simulation in Engineering, Economics and Management, MS 2016, held in Teruel, Spain, in July 2016. The event was co-organized by the AMSE Association and the University of Zaragoza through the GESES Research Group, with the support of the SoGReS-MF Research Group from University Jaume I. This edition of the conference paid special attention to modeling and simulation in diverse fields of business ma...