As a text for an undergraduate mathematics course for nonmajors, Mathematics and Politics requires no prerequisites in either area while the underlying philosophy involves minimizing algebraic computations and focusing instead on some conceptual aspects of mathematics in the context of important real-world questions in political science. Five major topics are covered including a model of escalation, game theoretic models of international conflict, yes-no voting systems, political power, and social choice. Each topic is discussed in an introductory chapter and revisited in more depth in a later chapter. This new edition has added co-author, Allison Pacelli, and two new chapters on "Fairness" and "More Fairness." The examples and the exercises have been updated and enhanced throughout. Reviews from first edition: This book is well written and has much math of interest. While it is pitched at a non-math audience there is material here that will be new and interesting to the readers... -Sigact News For mathematicians, Taylor's book shows how the social sciences make use of mathematical thinking, in the form of axiomatic systems, and offers a chance to teach this kind of thinking to our students. - The College Mathematics Journal The writing is crisp and the sense of excitement about learning mathematics is seductive. The political conflict examples are well thought out and clear. -Michael C. Munger

Mathematics and Politics: Strategy, Voting, Power, and Proof

Business & Money

Taylor, Alan D.

Pacelli, Allison M.

Economics

Springer

interest in a particular application, however, often depends on his or hergeneralinterestintheareainwhichtheapplicationistakingplace. My experience at Union College has been that there is a real advan tage in having students enter the course knowing thatvirtually all the applications will focus on a single discipline-in this case, political science. The level ofpresentation assumes no college-level mathematicalor social science prerequisites. The philosophy underlying the approach we have taken in this book is based on the sense that we (mathemati cians)havetendedtomaketwoerrorsinteachingnonsciencestudents: wehaveoverestimatedtheircomfortwithcomputationalmaterial,and we have underestimated their ability to handle conceptual material. Thus, while there is very little algebra (and certainly no calculus) in our presentation, we have included numerous logical arguments that students in the humanitiesand the socialscienceswill find accessible, but not trivial. The book contains five main topics: a m.odel of escalation, game theoretic models of international conflict, yes-no voting systems, political power, and social choice. The first partofthe text is made up of a single chapter devoted to each topic. The second part of the text revisits each topic, again with a single chapter devoted to each. The organizationofthe bookisbasedonpedagogicalconsiderations, with the material becoming somewhat more sophisticated as one moves through the ten chapters. On the other hand, within any given chap terthere is little reliance on material from earlierchapters, except for those devoted to the same topic.

Mathematics and Politics: Strategy, Voting, Power and Proof (Textbooks in Mathematical Sciences)

Offers a negotiating technique that is not only fair but also guarantees that both parties walk away with as much of the "win-win" potential as possible

The Win/Win Solution: Guaranteeing Fair Shares to Everyone

Brams, Steven J.

Management & Leadership

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Fair Division: From Cake-Cutting to Dispute Resolution

Fair Division, unlike most research on fairness in the social sciences and mathematics, is devoted solely to the analysis of constructive procedures for actually dividing things up and resolving disputes, including indivisible items or issues, such as the marital property in a divorce or sovereignty in an international dispute.

Cambridge University Press

Social Choice and the Mathematics of Manipulation (Outlooks)

Honesty in voting is not always the best policy. This is a book for mathematicians, political scientists, economists and philosophers who want to understand how it is impossible to devise a reasonable voting system in which voters can never gain by submitting a disingenuous ballot. The book requires no prerequisites except a willingness to follow rigorous mathematical arguments.

Science & Math

Mathematics

The Mathematical Association of America

Honesty in voting is not always the best policy. This is a book for mathematicians, political scientists, economists and philosophers who want to understand how it is impossible to devise a reasonable voting system in which voters can never gain by submitting a disingenuous ballot. The book requires no prerequisites except a willingness to follow rigorous mathematical arguments.

Simple games are mathematical structures inspired by voting systems in which a single alternative, such as a bill, is pitted against the status quo. The first in-depth mathematical study of the subject as a coherent subfield of finite combinatorics--one with its own organized body of techniques and results--this book blends new theorems with some of the striking results from threshold logic, making all of it accessible to game theorists. Introductory material receives a fresh treatment, with an emphasis on Boolean subgames and the Rudin-Keisler order as unifying concepts. Advanced material focuses on the surprisingly wide variety of properties related to the weightedness of a game.
 A desirability relation orders the individuals or coalitions of a game according to their influence in the corresponding voting system. As Taylor and Zwicker show, acyclicity of such a relation approximates weightedness--the more sensitive the relation, the closer the approximation. A trade is an exchange of players among coalitions, and robustness under such trades is equivalent to weightedness of the game. Robustness under trades that fit some restrictive exchange pattern typically characterizes a wider class of simple games--for example, games for which some particular desirability order is acyclic. Finally, one can often describe these wider classes of simple games by weakening the total additivity of a weighting to obtain what is called a pseudoweighting. In providing such uniform explanations for many of the structural properties of simple games, this book showcases numerous new techniques and results.

Simple Games

Zwicker, William S.

Princeton University Press

Two prisoners are told that they will be brought to a room and seated so that each can see the other. Hats will be placed on their heads; each hat is either red or green. The two prisoners must simultaneously submit a guess of their own hat color, and they both go free if at least one of them guesses correctly. While no communication is allowed once the hats have been placed, they will, however, be allowed to have a strategy session before being brought to the room. Is there a strategy ensuring their release? The answer turns out to be yes, and this is the simplest non-trivial example of a “hat problem.” 
This book deals with the question of how successfully one can predict the value of an arbitrary function at one or more points of its domain based on some knowledge of its values at other points. Topics range from hat problems that are accessible to everyone willing to think hard, to some advanced topics in set theory and infinitary combinatorics. For example, there is a method of predicting the value f(a) of a function f mapping the reals to the reals, based only on knowledge of f's values on the open interval (a – 1, a), and for every such function the prediction is incorrect only on a countable set that is nowhere dense. 
The monograph progresses from topics requiring fewer prerequisites to those requiring more, with most of the text being accessible to any graduate student in mathematics. The broad range of readership includes researchers, postdocs, and graduate students in the fields of set theory, mathematical logic, and combinatorics. The hope is that this book will bring together mathematicians from different areas to think about set theory via a very broad array of coordinated inference problems.

The Mathematics of Coordinated Inference: A Study of Generalized Hat Problems (Developments in Mathematics, 33)

Hardin, Christopher S.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Taylor, Alan D.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Taylor, Alan D.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Taylor, Alan D.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Mathematics and Politics: Strategy, Voting, Power, and Proof

Mathematics and Politics: Strategy, Voting, Power and Proof (Textbooks in Mathematical Sciences)

The Win/Win Solution: Guaranteeing Fair Shares to Everyone

Fair Division: From Cake-Cutting to Dispute Resolution

Social Choice and the Mathematics of Manipulation (Outlooks)

Fair Division: From Cake-Cutting to Dispute Resolution

Fair Division: From Cake-Cutting to Dispute Resolution

Social Choice and the Mathematics of Manipulation (Outlooks)

Simple Games

The Mathematics of Coordinated Inference: A Study of Generalized Hat Problems (Developments in Mathematics, 33)