These essays by contributors from disciplines ranging from economics to psychology present the most significant advances in strategic choice theory. In three parts the book addresses many-player, few-player and one-player situations.

Explains how companies must pinpoint business strategies to a few critically important choices, identifying common blunders while outlining simple exercises and questions that can guide day-to-day and long-term decisions.

Games and elections are fundamental activities in society with applications in economics, political science, and sociology. These topics offer familiar, current, and lively subjects for a course in mathematics. This classroom-tested textbook, primarily intended for a general education course in game theory at the freshman or sophomore level, provides an elementary treatment of games and elections. Starting with basics such as gambling, zero-sum and combinatorial games, Nash equilibria, social dilemmas, and fairness and impossibility theorems for elections, the text then goes further into the theory with accessible proofs of advanced topics such as the Sprague-Grundy theorem and Arrow's impossibility theorem. * Uses an integrative approach to probability, game, and social choice theory * Provides a gentle introduction to the logic of mathematical proof, thus equipping readers with the necessary tools for further mathematical studies * Contains numerous exercises and examples of varying levels of difficulty * Requires only a high school mathematical background.

This book argues that while the US president makes foreign policy decisions based largely on political pressures, it is concentrated interests that shape the incentive structures in which he and other top officials operate. The author identifies three groups most likely to be influential: government contractors, the national security bureaucracy, and foreign governments. This book shows that the public choice perspective is superior to a theory of grand strategy in explaining the most important aspects of American foreign policy, including the war on terror, policy toward China, and the distribution of US forces abroad. Arguing that American leaders are selected to respond to public opinion, not necessarily according to their ability to formulate and execute long-terms plans, the author shows how mass attitudes are easily malleable in the domain of foreign affairs due to ignorance with regard to the topic, the secrecy that surrounds national security issues, the inherent complexity of the issues involved, and most importantly, clear cases of concentrated interests. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of American Studies, Foreign Policy Analysis and Global Governance.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.

An ideal supplement in any introductory course, American Politics: Strategy and Choice analyzes American politics through the lens of individuals making rational choices within a set of rules and institutions.

Thinking strategically is what separates managers and leaders. Learn the fundamentals about how to create winning strategy and lead your team to deliver it. From understanding what strategy can do for you, through to creating a strategy and engaging others with strategy, this book offers practical guidance and expert tips. It is peppered with punchy, memorable examples from real leaders winning (and losing) with real world strategies. It can be read as a whole or you can dip into the easy-to-read, bite-size sections as and when you need to deal with a particular issue. The structure has been specially designed to make sections quick and easy to use – you’ll find yourself referring back to them again and again.

Advanced Textbooks in Economics, Volume 18: The Strategy of Social Choice focuses on the social, economics, and political implications of social choice. The publication first surveys introduction, social choice functions and correspondences, and monotonicity and the arrow theorem. Discussions focus on efficiency, anonymity and neutrality, classifying voting methods, normative versus positive approach to voting, voting and the non-strategic theory of social choice, and development of the strategic theory of voting. The text then ponders on strategy-proofness and monotonicity and sophisticated voting. Topics include sophisticated implementation, voting by binary choices, strategy-proof social choice functions and game forms, Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem, and restricted domains. The manuscript examines cooperative voting and voting by veto, including the minority principle, proportional veto core, voting by integer veto, effectivity functions, maximal and stable effectivity functions, and implementation by Nash equilibrium. The text is a dependable source of data for researchers interested in the process of social choice.

Strategies of enterprises evolve with the development of strategic management theory and new concepts, models, and outlooks that emerge with it. The concept of ambidexterity is a relatively new approach to business development strategies, which involves simultaneous exploration and exploitation activities to ensure the success of the company and a relatively sustainable competitive advantage. This begs the question as to whether the ambidextrous strategy is the right choice for all enterprises, and if not, what determines its choice. This book identifies and systematizes antecedents for choosing ambidextrous strategy, including factors related to the uncertainty of the environment, its dynamics, complexity, and unpredictability, intra-organizational factors, those related to resources, organizational structure, and behavioral context, as well as those related to strategic leadership. It examines the outcomes of implementing ambidexterity from the perspective of financial and market performance and assesses the choices of companies operating in Poland from the perspective of the impact that particular antecedents had and the outcomes achieved, providing knowledge and guidance on the circumstances in which choosing the ambidextrous strategy brings the best results. The book presents the research findings to date, the cognitive gaps that still exist, and the directions for further research. It is intended for scientific circles, doctoral and management students and a wide range of managers, who have to make difficult strategic choices aimed, on the one hand, at increasing the efficiency of the company and, on the other, at seeking new paths of growth.

You think you have a winning strategy. But do you? Executives are bombarded with bestselling ideas and best practices for achieving competitive advantage, but many of these ideas and practices contradict each other. Should you aim to be big or fast? Should you create a blue ocean, be adaptive, play to win—or forget about a sustainable competitive advantage altogether? In a business environment that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex almost by the day, it’s never been more important—or more difficult—to choose the right approach to strategy. In this book, The Boston Consulting Group’s Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha offer a proven method to determine the strategy approach that is best for your company. They start by helping you assess your business environment—how unpredictable it is, how much power you have to change it, and how harsh it is—a critical component of getting strategy right. They show how existing strategy approaches sort into five categories—Be Big, Be Fast, Be First, Be the Orchestrator, or simply Be Viable—depending on the extent of predictability, malleability, and harshness. In-depth explanations of each of these approaches will provide critical insight to help you match your approach to strategy to your environment, determine when and how to execute each one, and avoid a potentially fatal mismatch. Addressing your most pressing strategic challenges, you’ll be able to answer questions such as: • What replaces planning when the annual cycle is obsolete? • When can we—and when should we—shape the game to our advantage? • How do we simultaneously implement different strategic approaches for different business units? • How do we manage the inherent contradictions in formulating and executing different strategies across multiple businesses and geographies? Until now, no book brings it all together and offers a practical tool for understanding which strategic approach to apply. Get started today.