Donald G. Saari - Böcker

It is not uncommon to be frustrated by the outcome of an election or a decision in voting, law, economics, engineering, and other fields. Does this 'bad' result reflect poor data or poorly informed voters? Or does the disturbing conclusion reflect the choice of the decision/election procedure? Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow's famed theorem has been interpreted to mean 'no decision procedure is without flaws'. Similarly, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen dashes hope for individual liberties by showing their incompatibility with societal needs. This highly accessible book offers a new, different interpretation and resolution of Arrow's and Sen's theorems. Using simple mathematics, it shows that these negative conclusions arise because, in each case, some of their assumptions negate other crucial assumptions. Once this is understood, not only do the conclusions become expected, but a wide class of other phenomena can also be anticipated.

We decide by elections, but do we elect who the voters really want? The answer, as we have learned over the last two centuries, is 'not necessarily'. What a negative, frightening assertion about a principal tool of democracy! This negativism has been supported by two hundred years of published results showing how bad the situation can be. This expository, largely non-technical book is the first to find positive results showing that the situation is not anywhere as dire and negative as we have been led to believe. Instead there are surprisingly simple explanations for the negative assertions, and positive conclusions can be obtained.

We decide by elections, but do we elect who the voters really want? The answer, as we have learned over the last two centuries, is 'not necessarily'. What a negative, frightening assertion about a principal tool of democracy! This negativism has been supported by two hundred years of published results showing how bad the situation can be. This expository, largely non-technical book is the first to find positive results showing that the situation is not anywhere as dire and negative as we have been led to believe. Instead there are surprisingly simple explanations for the negative assertions, and positive conclusions can be obtained.

It is not uncommon to be frustrated by the outcome of an election or a decision in voting, law, economics, engineering, and other fields. Does this 'bad' result reflect poor data or poorly informed voters? Or does the disturbing conclusion reflect the choice of the decision/election procedure? Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow's famed theorem has been interpreted to mean 'no decision procedure is without flaws'. Similarly, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen dashes hope for individual liberties by showing their incompatibility with societal needs. This highly accessible book offers a new, different interpretation and resolution of Arrow's and Sen's theorems. Using simple mathematics, it shows that these negative conclusions arise because, in each case, some of their assumptions negate other crucial assumptions. Once this is understood, not only do the conclusions become expected, but a wide class of other phenomena can also be anticipated.

What does the 2000 U.S. presidential election have in common with selecting a textbook for a calculus course in your department? Was Ralph Nader's influence on the election of George W. Bush greater than the now-famous chads? In ""Chaotic Elections!"", Don Saari analyzes these questions, placing them in the larger context of voting systems in general. His analysis shows that the fundamental problems with the 2000 presidential election are not with the courts, recounts, or defective ballots, but are caused by the very way Americans vote for president. This expository book shows how mathematics can help to identify and characterize a disturbingly large number of paradoxical situations that result from the choice of a voting procedure. Moreover, rather than being able to dismiss them as anomalies, the likelihood of a dubious election result is surprisingly large.These consequences indicate that election outcomes - whether for president, the site of the next Olympics, the chair of a university department, or a prize winner - can differ from what the voters really wanted. They show that by using an inadequate voting procedure, we can, inadvertently, choose badly. To add to the difficulties, it turns out that the mathematical structures of voting admit several strategic opportunities, which are described. Finally, mathematics also helps identify positive results: by using mathematical symmetries, we can identify what the phrase 'what the voters really want' might mean and obtain a unique voting method that satisfies these conditions.Saari's book should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand not only what happened in the presidential election of 2000, but also how we can avoid similar problems from appearing anytime any group is making a choice using a voting procedure. Reading this book requires little more than high school mathematics and an interest in how the apparently simple situation of voting can lead to surprising paradoxes.

The mathematical challenges coming from the social and behavioral sciences differ significantly from typical applied mathematical concerns. ""Change,"" for instance, is ubiquitous, but without knowing the fundamental driving force, standard differential and iterative methods are not appropriate. Although differing forms of aggregation are widely used, a general mathematical assessment of potential pitfalls is missing. These realities provide opportunities to create new mathematical approaches.These themes are described in an introductory, expository, and accessible manner by exploring new ways to handle dynamics and evolutionary game theory, to identify subtleties of decision and voting methods, to recognize unexpected modeling concerns, and to introduce new approaches with which to examine game theory. Applications range from avoiding undesired consequences when designing policy to identifying unanticipated voting (where the ""wrong"" person could win), nonparametric statistical, and economic ""supply and demand"" properties.

This textbook invites the reader to develop a holistic grounding in mathematical finance, where concepts and intuition play as important a role as powerful mathematical tools.

This monograph develops a method of creating convenient coordinate systems for game theory that will allow readers to more easily understand, analyze, and create games at various levels of complexity.

A surprise is how the complexities of voting theory can be explained and resolved with the comfortable geometry of our three-dimensional world. This book is directed toward students and others wishing to learn about voting, experts will discover previously unpublished results. As an example, a new profile decomposition quickly resolves two centuries old controversies of Condorcet and Borda, demonstrates, that the rankings of pairwise and other methods differ because they rely on different information, casts series doubt on the reliability of a Condorcet winner as a standard for the field, makes the famous Arrow`s Theorem predictable, and simplifies the construction of examples. The geometry unifies seemingly disparate topics as manipulation, monotonicity, and even the apportionment issues of the US Supreme Court.