Search results for ""Author Alan D. Taylor""

Since the publication of Roger Fisher and William Ury's highly influential book, Getting to Yes, it has been widely recognized that there is a middle ground between winning and losing in negotiation. Yet, while Getting to Yes was long on motivation, it was short on technique. What you really want to know is on which issues you will win, on which you will lose, and on which you will have to compromise. To this question, Steven J. Brams and Alan D. Taylor bring a patented procedure that not only is fair but also actually guarantees that both parties walk away with as much of the "win-win" potential as possible. "One can hire a lawyer and spend years and thousands of dollars fighting [in a divorce], or one can make use of a neat new formula devised by Steven Brams and Alan Taylor."—The New Yorker

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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.

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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

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