This introduction presents the theme of this volume, the rationale for it, and the history of the conference series from which it originated. It provides also a short description of the papers included.

We address quality control of products undergoing multiple transshipment stages handled by different parties. Depending on the transportation modes, the stages may expose the products to hostile environments, such as extreme temperatures, which could influence quality. We incorporate the effect...

This paper introduces a methodology based on fuzzy game theory to determine the buyer's priority of the attributes and select a product in the e-business system. The game theory model developed in our paper considers the prioritization of attributes as strategies for the player (player 1) in one...

In this paper, we develop a non-cooperative game theoretic model for our problem context in which the competing producers adopt one of the two alternate production and marketing technologies — efficient and inefficient. We examine stability related implications of the producers' decisions...

Horizontal supply chains is the term used when suppliers competing at a particular level of the chain form a coalition to benefit from their cooperation rather than the usual competitive strategies used by them to become part of the supply chain. Such horizontal cooperation among competitors is...

This is the second volume in a three-volume exposition of Martin Shubik's vision of "mathematical institutional economics"—a term he coined in 1959 to describe the theoretical underpinnings needed for the construction of an economic dynamics. The goal is to develop a process-oriented theory of...

A computational procedure, Simulated Fictitious Play (SFP), is introduced to approximate equilibrium solutions for n-person, non-cooperative games with large strategy spaces. A variant of the iterative solution process fictitious play (FP), SFP is first demonstrated on several small n-person...

The PERT (Program Evaluation Review Technique) is a operational research tool used to schedule and coordinate activities in a complex project. We present two values for measuring the importance of each activity. Both values are obtained through an axiomatic characterization using three...

This paper examines some of the consequences for economic theory of the replacement of binary personal preferences by non-binary personal preferences in an Arrow-Debreu society as in Debreu (1959), and reaches the conclusion that there is both much damage to existing theory and greater...

The impossibility of speculative trade result (Milgrom and Stokey, 1982) provokes the questions why traders care about their private information, if they cannot profit from it and how the aggregate information can then be reflected in REE prices. This paper answers these questions by analyzing a...