Our ontology as well as our grammar are, as Quine affirms, ineliminable parts of our conceptual contribution to our theory of the world. It seems impossible to think of enti- ties, individuals and events without specifying and constructing, in advance, a specific language that must be used in order to speak about these same entities. We really know only insofar as we regiment our system of the world in a consistent and adequate way. At the level of proper nouns and existence functions we have, for instance, a standard form of a regimented language whose complementary apparatus consists of...

It is an obvious fact that human agency is constrained and structured by many kinds of rules: rules that are constitutive for communication, morality, persons, and society, and juridical rules. So the question is: what roles are played by social rules and the structural traits of human agency in rational decision making? What bearing does this have on the theory of practical rationality? These issues can only be discussed within an interdisciplinary setting, with researchers drawn from philosophy, decision theory and the economic and social sciences. The problem is of profound, fundamental...

This text discusses the mathematical analysis of social systems, understood in the following way: social systems consist of social actors who interact according to specific rules of interactions; the dynamics of social systems is then the consequences of these interactions, viz., the self-organization of social systems. According to particular demands of their environment, social systems are able to behave in an adaptive manner, that is they can change their rules of interaction by certain meta rules and thus generate a meta dynamics. It is possible to model and analyze mathematically both...

Social and Economic Networks in Cooperative Game Theory presents a coherent overview of theoretical literature that studies the influence and formation of networks in social and economic situations in which the relations between participants who are not included in a particular participant's network are not of consequence to this participant.
The material is organized in two parts. In Part I the authors concentrate on the question how network structures affect economic outcomes. Part II of the book presents the formation of networks by agents who engage in a network-formation...

I would like to use this preface to thank some persons and institutions which have been important during the various stages of writing this book. First of all, I am grateful to Kluwer Academic Publishers for giving me the opportunity to write this book. I started writing the book in 1998 while I was working at the Departament d'Economia i d'Historia Economica at Universidad Autonoma de Barcelona, and continued the writing job from september 1998 to september 2000 at the Departamento de Economfa at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. The book has been completed while I was visiting the...

Analog Design for CMOS VLSI Systems is a comprehensive text that offers a detailed study of the background principles and the analog design techniques for CMOS-VLSI implementation. The book covers the physical operation and the modelling of MOS transistors. Discusses the key features of integrated passive components and studies basic building blocks and voltage and current references before considering in great details the design of op-amps and comparators. The book is primarily intended for use as a graduate-level textbook and for practising engineers. It is expected that the reader should...

The aim of Cooperative Games on Combinatorial Structures is to analyze conflict situations in which two or more players can make coalitions and obtain prizes and penalties. This approach to situations of competition and cooperation was given in the seminal treatise by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Cooperative game theory has succeeded in providing many applications of game theory.
In this volume, games defined on combinatorial structures will be analyzed, i.e. a set system over a set of players. In many...

Beliefs, Interactions and Preferences in Decision Making mixes a selection of papers, presented at the Eighth Foundations and Applications of Utility and Risk Theory (FUR VIII') conference in Mons, Belgium, together with a few solicited papers from well-known authors in the field.
This book addresses some of the questions that have recently emerged in the research on decision-making and risk theory. In particular, authors have modeled more and more as interactions between the individual and the environment or between different individuals the emergence of beliefs as well as the...

This collection of papers is an outgrowth of the "Game Practice I" th th conference held in Genoa from 28 to 30 June 1998. More precisely, it is the result of the call for papers that was issued in association with that conference: actually, nearly half of the contributions to this book are papers that were presented in Genoa. The name chosen for the conference and for this book is in evident and provocative contrast with "Game Theory": this choice needs some explanation, and to that we shall devote a few words of this Preface. Let us say at the outset that "Game Practice" would not exist...

Franciska de Jong and Jan Landsbergen Jan Landsbergen 2 A compositional definition of the translation relation Jan Odijk 3 M-grammars Jan Landsbergen and Franciska de Jong 4 The translation process Lisette Appelo 5 The Rosetta characteristics Joep Rous and Harm Smit 6 Morphology Jan Odijk, Harm Smit and Petra de Wit 7 Dictionaries Jan Odijk 8 Syntactic rules Modular and controlled Lisette Appelo 9 M-grammars Compositionality and syntactic Jan Odijk 10 generalisations Jan Odijk and Elena Pinillos Bartolome 11 Incorporating theoretical linguistic insights Lisette Appelo 12 Divergences between...