This book discusses stochastic game theory and related concepts. Topics focused upon in the book include matrix games, finite, infinite, and undiscounted stochastic games, n-player cooperative games, minimax theorem, and more. In addition to important definitions and theorems, the book provides readers with a range of problem-solving techniques and exercises. This book is of value to graduate students and readers of probability and statistics alike.

This book for beginning graduate students presents a course on stochastic games and the mathematical methods used in their analysis.

This volume is based on lectures given at the NATO Advanced Study Institute on "Stochastic Games and Applications," which took place at Stony Brook, NY, USA, July 1999. It gives the editors great pleasure to present it on the occasion of L.S. Shapley's eightieth birthday, and on the fiftieth "birthday" of his seminal paper "Stochastic Games," with which this volume opens. We wish to thank NATO for the grant that made the Institute and this volume possible, and the Center for Game Theory in Economics of the State University of New York at Stony Brook for hosting this event. We also wish to thank the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, for providing continuing financial support, without which this project would never have been completed. In particular, we are grateful to our editorial assistant Mike Borns, whose work has been indispensable. We also would like to acknowledge the support of the Ecole Poly tech nique, Paris, and the Israel Science Foundation. March 2003 Abraham Neyman and Sylvain Sorin ix STOCHASTIC GAMES L.S. SHAPLEY University of California at Los Angeles Los Angeles, USA 1. Introduction In a stochastic game the play proceeds by steps from position to position, according to transition probabilities controlled jointly by the two players.

This book presents recent findings and results concerning the solutions of especially finite state-space Markov decision problems and determining Nash equilibria for related stochastic games with average and total expected discounted reward payoffs. In addition, it focuses on a new class of stochastic games: stochastic positional games that extend and generalize the classic deterministic positional games. It presents new algorithmic results on the suitable implementation of quasi-monotonic programming techniques. Moreover, the book presents applications of positional games within a class of multi-objective discrete control problems and hierarchical control problems on networks. Given its scope, the book will benefit all researchers and graduate students who are interested in Markov theory, control theory, optimization and games.

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.

This two-volume set of texts explores the central facts and ideas of stochastic processes, illustrating their use in models based on applied and theoretical investigations. They demonstrate the interdependence of three areas of study that usually receive separate treatments: stochastic processes, operating characteristics of stochastic systems, and stochastic optimization. Comprehensive in its scope, they emphasize the practical importance, intellectual stimulation, and mathematical elegance of stochastic models and are intended primarily as graduate-level texts.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the XVIII International Conference on Data Science and Intelligent Analysis of Information (ICDSIAI'2018), held in Kiev, Ukraine on June 4-7, 2018. The conference series, which dates back to 2001 when it was known as the Workshop on Intelligent Analysis of Information, was renamed in 2008 to reflect the broadening of its scope and the composition of its organizers and participants. ICDSIAI'2018 brought together a large number of participants from numerous countries in Europe, Asia and the USA. The papers presented addressed novel theoretical developments in methods, algorithms and implementations for the broadly perceived areas of big data mining and intelligent analysis of data and information, representation and processing of uncertainty and fuzziness, including contributions on a range of applications in the fields of decision-making and decision support, economics, education, ecology, law, and various areas of technology. The book is dedicated to the memory of the conference founder, the late Professor Tetiana Taran, an outstanding scientist in the field of artificial intelligence whose research record, vision and personality have greatly contributed to the development of Ukrainian artificial intelligence and computer science.

This book discusses recent developments in mathematical programming and game theory, and the application of several mathematical models to problems in finance, games, economics and graph theory. All contributing authors are eminent researchers in their respective fields, from across the world. This book contains a collection of selected papers presented at the 2017 Symposium on Mathematical Programming and Game Theory at New Delhi during 9–11 January 2017. Researchers, professionals and graduate students will find the book an essential resource for current work in mathematical programming, game theory and their applications in finance, economics and graph theory. The symposium provides a forum for new developments and applications of mathematical programming and game theory as well as an excellent opportunity to disseminate the latest major achievements and to explore new directions and perspectives.

Game theory involves multi-person decision making and differential dynamic game theory has been widely applied to n-person decision making problems, which are stimulated by a vast number of applications. This book addresses the gap to discuss general stochastic n-person noncooperative and cooperative game theory with wide applications to control systems, signal processing systems, communication systems, managements, financial systems, and biological systems. H∞ game strategy, n-person cooperative and noncooperative game strategy are discussed for linear and nonlinear stochastic systems along with some computational algorithms developed to efficiently solve these game strategies.