Game theory plays a crucial role in our lives and provides startling insights into all endeavors in which humans cooperate or compete, including biology, computer science, politics, agriculture, and, most importantly, economics.For example, game theory*has become an invaluable tool for economists, underpinning the theories of five Nobel Prize winners in economics;*helps corporate decision makers through the alternatives of complex negotiations where thousands of jobs and billions of dollars may be at stake;*plays a crucial role in international diplomacy and military strategy, influencing the fates of nations even when that influence may well be invisible to the uninitiated; and provides insights into the origins of human behaviors, not only for psychologists seeking to understand why we act as we do, but also for evolutionary biologists asking how those patterns of actions—as human strategies—were handed down.You can even see game theory at work in the interactions you engage in every day, such as an obvious "game," like buying a car, or a less obvious one, like trying to decide where to go on a Saturday night or how you ought to dress.A basic working knowledge of this profoundly important tool can help us cut through an often confusing clutter of information—allowing us to make better decisions in our own lives or better understand the decisions facing other players in games. In Games People Play: Game Theory in Life, Business, and Beyond, award-winning Professor Scott P. Stevens of James Madison University has designed a course meant for anyone looking to gain that knowledge. In 24 insightful lectures, he presents you with the fundamentals of game theory in a manner that is both engaging and easy to understand.

    'Highliners' is the commercial fishermen's term for their own elite, the skippers and crews who bring in the biggest hauls. Set in Kodiak, Highliners brings into sharp relief the lives of the men and women who make their living catching salmon, king crab, halibut, and shrimp off the coast of Alaska. Hank Crawford comes to Kodiak as a college student to work in the canneries during the summer. But he is inexorably drawn to the water and to the hard, often brutal existence of the fishermen, and ultimately, he joins their ranks. Highliners chronicles Hank's journey from greenhorn to highliner, and the triumphs and tragedies of the people he comes to know so well. (6 X 9, 408 pages, maps, illustrations)

    Personal accounts and anecdotes offer insight into life during the Great Depression, describing such events as the closing of the banks, looking for a job, braving the ""Dust Bowl,"" and discovering homemade fun.

    Myerson introduces, clarifies, and synthesizes the extraordinary advances made in the subject over the past fifteen years, presents an overview of decision theory, and comprehensively reviews the development of the fundamental models: games in extensive form and strategic form, and Bayesian games with incomplete information.Game Theory will be useful for students at the graduate level in economics, political science, operations research, and applied mathematics. Everyone who uses game theory in research will find this book essential.

    The complexity of nature's shapes differs in kind, not merely degree, from that of the shapes of ordinary geometry, the geometry of fractal shapes.Now that the field has expanded greatly with many active researchers, Mandelbrot presents the definitive overview of the origins of his ideas and their new applications. The Fractal Geometry of Nature is based on his highly acclaimed earlier work, but has much broader and deeper coverage and more extensive illustrations.

    It proposes enlightening similarities between, for instance, maneuvering in limited war and in a traffic jam; deterring the Russians and one's own children; the modern strategy of terror and the ancient institution of hostages.

    Now Wright attempts something even more ambitious: explaining the direction of evolution and human history–and discerning where history will lead us next.In Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Wright asserts that, ever since the primordial ooze, life has followed a basic pattern. Organisms and human societies alike have grown more complex by mastering the challenges of internal cooperation. Wright's narrative ranges from fossilized bacteria to vampire bats, from stone-age villages to the World Trade Organization, uncovering such surprises as the benefits of barbarian hordes and the useful stability of feudalism. Here is history endowed with moral significance–a way of looking at our biological and cultural evolution that suggests, refreshingly, that human morality has improved over time, and that our instinct to discover meaning may itself serve a higher purpose. Insightful, witty, profound, Nonzero offers breathtaking implications for what we believe and how we adapt to technology's ongoing transformation of the world.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    One of baseball’s most valuable franchises, they had suffered an embarrassing late season collapse and two bitter losing seasons. Their GM had made costly mistakes. And their principle owners, two Bernie Madoff investors, were embroiled in the fall-out from the largest financial scam in American history.To whom did they turn? Sandy Alderson, a former marine who served in Vietnam and graduated from Harvard Law. Alderson started in baseball with the Oakland Athletics in 1981. Two years later, he was running the team.With the A’s, Alderson led a revolution in baseball. Partnering with Apple, he introduced the first computers into the sport and used statistical analysis for everything from unorthodox player evaluation to modernizing ticket sales. He attracted bright people and turned the team into a powerhouse, winning the 1989 World Series. When new owners slashed payroll, his creativity and intelligent management were thrust into the spotlight.Best-selling author Steve Kettmann follows Alderson's transformation of baseball over the last thirty years and his attempts to turn the Mets back into contenders. This is a gripping behind-the-scenes look at a Major League team and a fascinating exploration of what it means to be smart.

    . . a most valuable contribution." — Douglas R. Hofstadter, author of Gödel, Escher, BachThe foundations of game theory were laid by John von Neumann, who in 1928 proved the basic minimax theorem, and with the 1944 publication of the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, the field was established. Since then, game theory has become an enormously important discipline because of its novel mathematical properties and its many applications to social, economic, and political problems.Game theory has been used to make investment decisions, pick jurors, commit tanks to battle, allocate business expenses equitably — even to measure a senator's power, among many other uses. In this revised edition of his highly regarded work, Morton Davis begins with an overview of game theory, then discusses the two-person zero-sum game with equilibrium points; the general, two-person zero-sum game; utility theory; the two-person, non-zero-sum game; and the n-person game.A number of problems are posed at the start of each chapter and readers are given a chance to solve them before moving on. (Unlike most mathematical problems, many problems in game theory are easily understood by the lay reader.) At the end of the chapter, where solutions are discussed, readers can compare their "common sense" solutions with those of the author. Brimming with applications to an enormous variety of everyday situations, this book offers readers a fascinating, accessible introduction to one of the most fruitful and interesting intellectual systems of our time.

    Albert-László Barabási, the nation’s foremost expert in the new science of networks and author of Bursts, takes us on an intellectual adventure to prove that social networks, corporations, and living organisms are more similar than previously thought. Grasping a full understanding of network science will someday allow us to design blue-chip businesses, stop the outbreak of deadly diseases, and influence the exchange of ideas and information. Just as James Gleick and the Erdos–Rényi model brought the discovery of chaos theory to the general public, Linked tells the story of the true science of the future and of experiments in statistical mechanics on the internet, all vital parts of what would eventually be called the Barabási–Albert model.

    Holland dramatically shows us that the “emergence” of order from disorder has much to teach us about life, mind and organizations. Creative activities in both the arts and the sciences depend upon an ability to model the world. The most creative of those models exhibits emergent properties, so that “what comes out is more than what goes in.” From the ingenious checkers-playing computer that started beating its creator in game after game, to the emotive creations of the poet, Emergence shows that Holland’s theory successfully predicts many complex behaviors in art and science.

    Today Nash's beautiful math has become a universal language for research in the social sciences and has infiltrated the realms of evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and even quantum physics. John Nash won the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics for pioneering research published in the 1950s on a new branch of mathematics known as game theory. At the time of Nash's early work, game theory was briefly popular among some mathematicians and Cold War analysts. But it remained obscure until the 1970s when evolutionary biologists began applying it to their work. In the 1980s economists began to embrace game theory. Since then it has found an ever expanding repertoire of applications among a wide range of scientific disciplines. Today neuroscientists peer into game players' brains, anthropologists play games with people from primitive cultures, biologists use games to explain the evolution of human language, and mathematicians exploit games to better understand social networks. A common thread connecting much of this research is its relevance to the ancient quest for a science of human social behavior, or a Code of Nature, in the spirit of the fictional science of psychohistory described in the famous Foundation novels by the late Isaac Asimov. In A Beautiful Math, acclaimed science writer Tom Siegfried describes how game theory links the life sciences, social sciences, and physical sciences in a way that may bring Asimov's dream closer to reality.

    Above all it fizzes with a dizzying mix of deliciously vital ideas. . . A staggering achievement' Tim HarfordThe smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Self-replicating moon bases and nuclear weapons. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable man: John von Neumann.Born in Budapest at the turn of the century, von Neumann is one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived. His colleagues believed he had the fastest brain on the planet - bar none. He was instrumental in the Manhattan Project and helped formulate the bedrock of Cold War geopolitics and modern economic theory. He created the first ever programmable digital computer. He prophesied the potential of nanotechnology and, from his deathbed, expounded on the limits of brains and computers - and how they might be overcome.Taking us on an astonishing journey, Ananyo Bhattacharya explores how a combination of genius and unique historical circumstance allowed a single man to sweep through so many different fields of science, sparking revolutions wherever he went.Insightful and illuminating, The Man from the Future is a thrilling intellectual biography of the visionary thinker who shaped our century.

    He was referring to battlefield tactics, but the same can be said about any strategic situation. Even seemingly certain defeat can be turned into victory--whether in battle, business, or life--by those with the strategic vision to recognize how to "change the game" to their own advantage.The aim of David McAdams's Game-Changer is nothing less than to empower you with this wisdom--not just to win in every strategic situation (or "game") you face but to change those games and the ecosystems in which they reside to transform your life and our lives together for the better.Game-Changer develops six basic ways to change games--commitment, regulation, cartelization, retaliation, trust, and relationships--enlivened by countless colorful characters and unforgettable examples from the worlds of business, medicine, finance, military history, crime, sports, and more.The book then digs into several real-world strategic challenges, such as how to keep prices low on the Internet, how to restore the public's lost trust in for-charity telemarketers, and even how to save mankind from looming and seemingly unstoppable drug-resistant disease. In each case, McAdams uses the game-theory approach developed in the book to identify the strategic crux of the problem and then leverages that "game-awareness" to brainstorm ways to change the game to solve or at least mitigate the underlying problem.So get ready for a fascinating journey. You'll emerge a deeper strategic thinker, poised to change and win all the games you play. In doing so, you can also make the world a better place. "Just one Game-Changer [is] enough to seed and transform an entire organization into a more productive, happier, and altogether better place," McAdams writes. Just imagine what we can do together.

    Whether they bind computers, economies, or terrorist organizations, networks are everywhere in the real world, yet only recently have scientists attempted to explain their mysterious workings.From epidemics of disease to outbreaks of market madness, from people searching for information to firms surviving crisis and change, from the structure of personal relationships to the technological and social choices of entire societies, Watts weaves together a network of discoveries across an array of disciplines to tell the story of an explosive new field of knowledge, the people who are building it, and his own peculiar path in forging this new science.