T. Parthasarathy - Böcker

This text deals with various aspects of game theory and their applications to economics and operational research related problems. It brings together the contributions of a wide spectrum of disciplines such as statistics, mathematics, mathematical economics and OR. The contributions include decision theory, stochastic games, co-operative and nonco-operative games. The papers in the volume are classified under five different sections. The first four sections are devoted to the theory of two-person games, linear complimentarity problems and game theory, co-operative and nonco-operative games. The fifth section contains diverse applications of these various theories. Taken together they exhibit a rich versatility of these theories and lively interaction between the mathematical theory of games and significant economic problems.

The theory of two-person, zero-sum differential games started at the be- ginning of the 1960s with the works of R. Isaacs in the United States and L. S. Pontryagin and his school in the former Soviet Union. Isaacs based his work on the Dynamic Programming method. He analyzed many special cases of the partial differential equation now called Hamilton- Jacobi-Isaacs-briefiy HJI-trying to solve them explicitly and synthe- sizing optimal feedbacks from the solution. He began a study of singular surfaces that was continued mainly by J. Breakwell and P. Bernhard and led to the explicit solution of some low-dimensional but highly nontriv- ial games; a recent survey of this theory can be found in the book by J. Lewin entitled Differential Games (Springer, 1994). Since the early stages of the theory, several authors worked on making the notion of value of a differential game precise and providing a rigorous derivation of the HJI equation, which does not have a classical solution in most cases; we mention here the works of W. Fleming, A. Friedman (see his book, Differential Games, Wiley, 1971), P. P. Varaiya, E. Roxin, R. J. Elliott and N. J. Kalton, N. N. Krasovskii, and A. I.Subbotin (see their book Po- sitional Differential Games, Nauka, 1974, and Springer, 1988), and L. D. Berkovitz. A major breakthrough was the introduction in the 1980s of two new notions of generalized solution for Hamilton-Jacobi equations, namely, viscosity solutions, by M. G. Crandall and P. -L.

Game Theoretical Applications to Economics and Operations Research deals with various aspects of game theory and their applications to Economics and OR related problems. It brings together the contributions of a wide spectrum of disciplines such as Statistics, Mathematics, Mathematical Economics and OR. The contributions include decision theory, stochastic games, cooperative and noncooperative games. The papers in the volume are classified under five different sections. The first four sections are devoted to the theory of two-person games, linear complimentarity problems and game theory, cooperative and noncooperative games. The fifth section contains diverse applications of these various theories. Taken together they exhibit a rich versatility of these theories and lively interaction between the mathematical theory of games and significant economic problems.

The theory of two-person, zero-sum differential games started at the be- ginning of the 1960s with the works of R. Isaacs in the United States and L. S. Pontryagin and his school in the former Soviet Union. Isaacs based his work on the Dynamic Programming method. He analyzed many special cases of the partial differential equation now called Hamilton- Jacobi-Isaacs-briefiy HJI-trying to solve them explicitly and synthe- sizing optimal feedbacks from the solution. He began a study of singular surfaces that was continued mainly by J. Breakwell and P. Bernhard and led to the explicit solution of some low-dimensional but highly nontriv- ial games; a recent survey of this theory can be found in the book by J. Lewin entitled Differential Games (Springer, 1994). Since the early stages of the theory, several authors worked on making the notion of value of a differential game precise and providing a rigorous derivation of the HJI equation, which does not have a classical solution in most cases; we mention here the works of W. Fleming, A. Friedman (see his book, Differential Games, Wiley, 1971), P. P. Varaiya, E. Roxin, R. J. Elliott and N. J. Kalton, N. N. Krasovskii, and A. I.Subbotin (see their book Po- sitional Differential Games, Nauka, 1974, and Springer, 1988), and L. D. Berkovitz. A major breakthrough was the introduction in the 1980s of two new notions of generalized solution for Hamilton-Jacobi equations, namely, viscosity solutions, by M. G. Crandall and P. -L.