Nimrod Megiddo - Böcker

This volume presents a collection of papers on game theory dedicated to Michael Maschler. Through his dedication and contributions to game theory, Maschler has become an important figure particularly in the area of cooperative games. Game theory has since become an important subject in operations research, economics and management science. As befits such a volume, the main themes covered are cooperative games, coalitions, repeated games, and a cost allocation games. All the contributions are authoritative surveys of a particular topic, so together they will present an invaluable overview of the field to all those working on game theory problems.

The starting point of this volume was a conference entitled "Progress in Mathematical Programming," held at the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California, March 1-4, 1987. The main topic of the conference was developments in the theory and practice of linear programming since Karmarkar's algorithm. There were thirty presentations and approximately fifty people attended. Presentations included new algorithms, new analyses of algorithms, reports on computational experience, and some other topics related to the practice of mathematical programming. Interestingly, most of the progress reported at the conference was on the theoretical side. Several new polynomial algorithms for linear program- ming were presented (Barnes-Chopra-Jensen, Goldfarb-Mehrotra, Gonzaga, Kojima-Mizuno-Yoshise, Renegar, Todd, Vaidya, and Ye). Other algorithms presented were by Betke-Gritzmann, Blum, Gill-Murray-Saunders-Wright, Nazareth, Vial, and Zikan-Cottle. Efforts in the theoretical analysis of algo- rithms were also reported (Anstreicher, Bayer-Lagarias, Imai, Lagarias, Megiddo-Shub, Lagarias, Smale, and Vanderbei).Computational experiences were reported by Lustig, Tomlin, Todd, Tone, Ye, and Zikan-Cottle. Of special interest, although not in the main direction discussed at the conference, was the report by Rinaldi on the practical solution of some large traveling salesman problems. At the time of the conference, it was still not clear whether the new algorithms developed since Karmarkar's algorithm would replace the simplex method in practice. Alan Hoffman presented results on conditions under which linear programming problems can be solved by greedy algorithms.

The papers in this volume were presented at the 1st International Conference on Algorithmic Applications in Management (AAIM 2005), held June 22-25, 2005 in Xi'an, China. The topics cover algorithmic applications in most manageme- related areas. Submissions to the conference this year were conducted electronically. A - tal of 140 papers were submitted, of which 46 were accepted. The papers were evaluated by an international Program Committee consisting of Franz Aur- hammer, Sergey Bereg, Danny Z. Chen, Jian Chen, Zhixiang Chen, Edith - hen, Xiaotie Deng, Michael Goldwasser, Jason Hartline, Wen-Lian Hsu, Haijun Huang, Minghui Jiang, Ellis Johnson, Naoki Katoh, Masakazu Kojima, Moh- mad Mahdian, Nimrod Megiddo, Zhongping Qin, Panos Pardalos, Chung Keung Poon, Bruce Reed, Shouyang Wang, Peter Widmayer, Yinfeng Xu, Frances Yao, Yinyu Ye and Binhai Zhu. The submitted papers were from Canada, Chile, China, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Iran, Israel, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Singapore, UK and USA. Each paper was evaluated by at least two Program Committee members, assisted in some cases by subreferees.In addition to selected papers, the conference also included two invited presentations, by Ellis Johnson and Yinyu Ye, and two invited papers, by Xujin Chen et al. and Siu-Wing Cheng et al. We thank all the people who made this meeting possible: the authors for s- mitting papers, the Program Committee members and external referees (listed on the pages that follows) for their excellent work, and the two invited speakers.