Electoral promises help to win votes and political candidates, or parties should strategically choose what they can deliver to win an election. Past game-theoretical studies tend to ignore electoral promises and this book sheds illuminating light on the functions and effects of electoral promises on policies or electoral outcomes through game theory models. This book provides a basic framework for game-theoretical analysis of electoral promises. ​ The book also includes cases to illustrate real life applications of these theories. ​

Political Game Theory is a self-contained introduction to game theory and its applications to political science. The book presents choice theory, social choice theory, static and dynamic games of complete information, static and dynamic games of incomplete information, repeated games, bargaining theory, mechanism design and a mathematical appendix covering, logic, real analysis, calculus and probability theory. The methods employed have many applications in various disciplines including comparative politics, international relations and American politics. Political Game Theory is tailored to students without extensive backgrounds in mathematics, and traditional economics, however there are also many special sections that present technical material that will appeal to more advanced students. A large number of exercises are also provided to practice the skills and techniques discussed.

Current inquiries into the political economy of financial policymaking in Malaysia tend to focus on the high-level drama of crisis politics or simply point to the limited impact of post-crisis financial reforms, given that politico-business relations have remained close. In so doing, pundits ignore a number of intriguing questions: what is the relationship between financial development and financialisation and how has it played out in the Malaysian context? And more generally: how can a country like Malaysia become significantly more financially developed, yet fail to emancipate the financial system from political control; a core element of the financial development discourse? To unravel the complexities of this puzzle, this book subjects the history and contemporary practices of financial policymaking in Malaysia to scrutiny. It argues that to understand financial development in Malaysia, its progress and reversals, it is important to conceptualise it as a political, rather than a merely technical process. In so doing, the book echoes a more profound concern in the political economy literature, namely the evolving relationship between states and markets, and the supposed retreat or reassertion of the state at a time of increasing (financial) globalisation. The book can generate further insights into the evolving role of the state with regard to broader processes of development and marketisation, as they relate specifically to finance.

Predicting foreign exchange rates has presented a long-standing challenge for economists. However, the recent advances in computational techniques, statistical methods, newer datasets on emerging market currencies, etc., offer some hope. While we are still unable to beat a driftless random walk model, there has been serious progress in the field. This book provides an in-depth assessment of the use of novel statistical approaches and machine learning tools in predicting foreign exchange rate movement. First, it offers a historical account of how exchange rate regimes have evolved over time, which is critical to understanding turning points in a historical time series. It then presents an overview of the previous attempts at modeling exchange rates, and how different methods fared during this process. At the core sections of the book, the author examines the time series characteristics of exchange rates and how contemporary statistics and machine learning can be useful in improving predictive power, compared to previous methods used. Exchange rate determination is an active research area, and this book will appeal to graduate-level students of international economics, international finance, open economy macroeconomics, and management. The book is written in a clear, engaging, and straightforward way, and will greatly improve access to this much-needed knowledge in the field.

This book is a timely exploration of an unprecedented, cataclysmic pandemic episode. It examines certain critical aspects of socio-scientific theory across a variety of diverse themes, and through an epistemic lens. The book investigates the general theory of pandemic episodes and their adverse long-term effects on human and environmental wellbeing. It includes an in-depth study of COVID-19 but also looks to the future to contemplate potential pandemics to come. The existing approach to the study of pandemics is critically examined in terms of the prevalent isolated and thus mutated way of viewing human and mechanical relations in the name of specialization and modernity. The book presents a novel model of science-economy-society moral inclusiveness that forms a distinctive theoretical approach to the issue of normalizing all forms of pandemic challenges. It is methodologically different from existing economic theory, including the critical study of microeconomic foundations of macroeconomics. Human and environmental existence along with its multidisciplinary outlook of unity of knowledge between modernity, traditionalism, and socio-cultural values is emphasized in the treatment and cure of pandemic episodes. The book is a unique reference work, offering fresh wisdom within the moral methodological worldview.

Drawing upon and extending his inaugural Lipsey Lectures, Debraj Ray looks at coalition formation from the perspective of game theory. Ray brings together developments in both cooperative and noncooperative game theory to study the analytics of coalition formation and binding agreements.

This book serves as an introduction to game theory for students with no prior game theory knowledge, or with limited background in economics and mathematics. It is specifically designed to provide an intuitive and accessible interdisciplinary approach to game theory, while simultaneously exploring cooperative games, repeated play, correlated equilibrium, and a range of applications. The Instructor Manual is available upon request for all instructors who adopt this book as a course text. Please send your request to [email protected].

As with the previous editions, this fourth edition relies on teaching by example and the Karplus Learning Cycle to convey the ideas of game theory in a way that is approachable, intuitive, and interdisciplinary. Noncooperative equilibrium concepts such as Nash equilibrium, mixed strategy equilibria, and subgame perfect equilibrium are systematically introduced in the first half of the book. Bayesian Nash equilibrium is briefly introduced. The subsequent chapters discuss cooperative solutions with and without side payments, rationalizable strategies and correlated equilibria, and applications to elections, social mechanism design, and larger-scale games. New examples include panic buying, supply-chain shifts in the pandemic, and global warming.

In this chapter the topic of this book is introduced. Section 1. 1 provides a brief and rather general motivation for the scientific project undertaken here. Interest groups are a very popular object of scientific inquiry, and they received already considerable research attention from scholars in political science, as well as from researchers in economics. Necessarily, then, this book adds to a literature which is already quite developed. A detailed positioning in this literature of the theoretical material presented in this monograph will be given in Chapter 2. This second chapter will also, by means of a review of the empirical literature, provide a more general overview of the issues deemed to be important when studying the influence of interest groups on public policy. The outline of the entire book is described in greater detail in Section 1. 2. As most issues involved are more easily presented in later chapters, this introductory chapter is kept brief. 1. 1 MOTIVATION Substantial political power is often attributed to interest groups. Examples abound in both the economics and political science literature, as well as in journalistic accounts and popular publications. On many occasions the authors express concerns about the negative impact of interest groups on the democratic quality of government. "The interests of a small group are served at the expense of the interests of the general public, the taxpayers!", is an often heard popular complaint.

Praise for the Second Edition: "This is quite a well-done book: very tightly organized, better-than-average exposition, and numerous examples, illustrations, and applications." —Mathematical Reviews of the American Mathematical Society An Introduction to Linear Programming and Game Theory, Third Edition presents a rigorous, yet accessible, introduction to the theoretical concepts and computational techniques of linear programming and game theory. Now with more extensive modeling exercises and detailed integer programming examples, this book uniquely illustrates how mathematics can be used in real-world applications in the social, life, and managerial sciences, providing readers with the opportunity to develop and apply their analytical abilities when solving realistic problems. This Third Edition addresses various new topics and improvements in the field of mathematical programming, and it also presents two software programs, LP Assistant and the Solver add-in for Microsoft Office Excel, for solving linear programming problems. LP Assistant, developed by coauthor Gerard Keough, allows readers to perform the basic steps of the algorithms provided in the book and is freely available via the book's related Web site. The use of the sensitivity analysis report and integer programming algorithm from the Solver add-in for Microsoft Office Excel is introduced so readers can solve the book's linear and integer programming problems. A detailed appendix contains instructions for the use of both applications. Additional features of the Third Edition include: A discussion of sensitivity analysis for the two-variable problem, along with new examples demonstrating integer programming, non-linear programming, and make vs. buy models Revised proofs and a discussion on the relevance and solution of the dual problem A section on developing an example in Data Envelopment Analysis An outline of the proof of John Nash's theorem on the existence of equilibrium strategy pairs for non-cooperative, non-zero-sum games Providing a complete mathematical development of all presented concepts and examples, Introduction to Linear Programming and Game Theory, Third Edition is an ideal text for linear programming and mathematical modeling courses at the upper-undergraduate and graduate levels. It also serves as a valuable reference for professionals who use game theory in business, economics, and management science.