Christophe Deissenberg - Böcker

Optimal Control and Dynamic Games has been edited to honor the outstanding contributions of Professor Suresh Sethi in the fields of Applied Optimal Control. Professor Sethi is internationally one of the foremost experts in this field. He is, among others, co-author of the popular textbook "Sethi and Thompson: Optimal Control Theory: Applications to Management Science and Economics". The book consists of a collection of essays by some of the best known scientists in the field, covering diverse aspects of applications of optimal control and dynamic games to problems in Finance, Management Science, Economics, and Operations Research. In doing so, it provides both a state-of-the-art overview over recent developments in the field, and a reference work covering the wide variety of contemporary questions that can be addressed with optimal control tools, and demonstrates the fruitfulness of the methodology.

The last fifteen or twenty years have been marked by fundamental advances in the sources of complex behavior in micro- and macro-economics, in the practical and methodological implications of such behavior, and in the methods and tools appropriate to cope with them. Much of these developments have been driven by the recognition and acceptance by economists of approaches initiated in other fields - such as non-linear dynamics, statistical physics, network theory, biology, computer science, and the use of computational methods as problem-solving tools - giving rise to important and innovative impulses to economic thinking. The sixteen papers in this book -- the fourteenth volume in the series International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics - reflect from various perspectives this recent evolution. They are the outgrow from a selection of communications presented at the COMPLEXITY2000 workshop held in Aix en Provence, France, 4-6 May 2000 - a workshop that brought together, from twenty-two nations, almost seventy economists, mathematicians, biologists and physicists interested in complex phenomena. All papers were strictly refereed in the intended tradition of the series: to provide journal quality collections of research papers of unusual importance in areas of currently highly visible activity within the economics profession. With its selection of articles, the book presents an overview of advanced contributions to complexity in economics and social system, such as chaotic dynamics and multiple equilibria, agent-based models, applications of genetic algorithms, non-equilibrium macro-dynamics, information transmission, learning mechanisms. Although the papers address economic problems, the authorship and the perspectives presented are interdisciplinary and provide therefore a number of innovative insights and solutions to classical or new questions.