In the last few years game theory has had a substantial impact on computer science, especially on Internet- and e-commerce-related issues. More than 40 of the top researchers in this field have written chapters that go from the foundations to the state of the art. Basic chapters on algorithmic methods for equilibria, mechanism design and combinatorial auctions are followed by chapters on incentives and pricing, cost sharing, information markets and cryptography and security. Students, researchers and practitioners alike need to learn more about these fascinating theoretical developments and their widespread practical application.

Mechanism design is an analytical framework for thinking clearly and carefully about what exactly a given institution can achieve when the information necessary to make decisions is dispersed and privately held. This analysis provides an account of the underlying mathematics of mechanism design based on linear programming. Three advantages characterize the approach. The first is simplicity: arguments based on linear programming are both elementary and transparent. The second is unity: the machinery of linear programming provides a way to unify results from disparate areas of mechanism design. The third is reach: the technique offers the ability to solve problems that appear to be beyond solutions offered by traditional methods. No claim is made that the approach advocated should supplant traditional mathematical machinery. Rather, the approach represents an addition to the tools of the economic theorist who proposes to understand economic phenomena through the lens of mechanism design.

This volume offers to general and specialist readers alike the fullest and most complete survey of the development of science in the eighteenth century, exploring the implications of the 'scientific revolution' of the previous century and the major new growth-points, particularly in the experimental sciences. It is designed to be read as both a narrative and an interpretation, and also used as a work of reference. While prime attention is paid to western science, space is also given to science in traditional cultures and colonial science. The coverage strikes a balance between analysis of the cognitive dimension of science itself and interpretation of its wider social, economic and cultural significance. The contributors, world leaders in their respective specialities, engage with current historiographical and methodological controversies and strike out on positions of their own.

This book in the highly respected Cambridge History of Science series is devoted to the history of the life and earth sciences since 1800. It provides comprehensive and authoritative surveys of historical thinking on major developments in these areas of science, on the social and cultural milieus in which the knowledge was generated, and on the wider impact of the major theoretical and practical innovations. The articles are written by acknowledged experts who provide concise accounts of the latest historical thinking coupled with guides to the most important recent literature. In addition to histories of traditional sciences, the book covers the emergence of newer disciplines such as genetics, biochemistry and geophysics. The interaction of scientific techniques with their practical applications in areas such as medicine is a major focus of the book, as is its coverage of controversial areas such as science and religion, and environmentalism.

Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models is a comprehensive manual for the applied researcher who wants to perform data analysis using linear and nonlinear regression and multilevel models. The book introduces a wide variety of models, whilst at the same time instructing the reader in how to fit these models using available software packages. The book illustrates the concepts by working through scores of real data examples that have arisen from the authors' own applied research, with programming codes provided for each one. Topics covered include causal inference, including regression, poststratification, matching, regression discontinuity, and instrumental variables, as well as multilevel logistic regression and missing-data imputation. Practical tips regarding building, fitting, and understanding are provided throughout. Author resource page: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/arm/

The uncertainty that researchers face in specifying their estimation model threatens the validity of their inferences. In regression analyses of observational data, the 'true model' remains unknown, and researchers face a choice between plausible alternative specifications. Robustness testing allows researchers to explore the stability of their main estimates to plausible variations in model specifications. This highly accessible book presents the logic of robustness testing, provides an operational definition of robustness that can be applied in all quantitative research, and introduces readers to diverse types of robustness tests. Focusing on each dimension of model uncertainty in separate chapters, the authors provide a systematic overview of existing tests and develop many new ones. Whether it be uncertainty about the population or sample, measurement, the set of explanatory variables and their functional form, causal or temporal heterogeneity, or effect dynamics or spatial dependence, this book provides guidance and offers tests that researchers from across the social sciences can employ in their own research.

Does economics hold the key to everything or does the recent financial crisis show that it has failed? This book provides an assessment of modern economics that cuts through the confusion and controversy on this question. Case studies of the creation of new markets, the Russian transition to capitalism, globalization, and money and finance establish that economics has been very successful where problems have been well defined and where the world can be changed to fit the theory, but that it has been less successful in tackling bigger problems. The book then offers a historical perspective on how economists have, since the Second World War, tried to make their subject scientific. It explores the evolving relationship between science and ideology and investigates the place of heterodoxy and dissent within the discipline.

The modern Middle East emerged out of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, when Britain and France partitioned the Ottoman Arab lands into several new colonial states. The following period was a charged and transformative time of unrest. Insurgent leaders, trained in Ottoman military tactics and with everything to lose from the fall of the Empire, challenged the mandatory powers in a number of armed revolts. This is a study of this crucial period in Middle Eastern history, tracing the period through popular political movements and the experience of colonial rule. In doing so, Provence emphasises the continuity between the late Ottoman and Colonial era, explaining how national identities emerged, and how the seeds were sown for many of the conflicts which have defined the Middle East in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This is a valuable read for students of Middle Eastern history and politics.

Reflecting the rising popularity of research that combines qualitative and quantitative social science, Multi-Method Social Science provides the first systematic guide to designing multi-method research. It argues that methods can be productively combined using the framework of integrative multi-method research, with one method used to carry out a final causal inference, and methods from other traditions used to test the key assumptions involved in that causal inference. In making this argument, Jason Seawright considers a wide range of statistical tools including regression, matching, and natural experiments. The book also discusses qualitative tools including process tracing, the use of causal process observations, and comparative case study research. Along the way, the text develops over a dozen multi-method designs to test key assumptions about social science causation.

Increasingly, political scientists are describing their empirical research or the reasoning behind their choices in empirical research using the terms "experiment" or "experimental." One of the primary reasons for doing so is the advantage of experiments in establishing causal inferences. In this book, Rebecca B. Morton and Kenneth C. Williams discuss in detail how experiments and experimental reasoning with observational data can help researchers determine causality. They explore how control and random assignment mechanisms work, examining both the Rubin causal model and the formal theory approaches to causality. They also cover general topics in experimentation such as the history of experimentation in political science; internal and external validity of experimental research; types of experiments - field, laboratory, virtual, and survey - and how to choose, recruit, and motivate subjects in experiments. They investigate ethical issues in experimentation, the process of securing approval from institutional review boards for human subject research, and the use of deception in experimentation.

Nationalism and the prevalence of ethnic conflict are features of contemporary politics. Many commentators have viewed such conflicts as a return to some primitive impulse. Andreas Wimmer's book argues that nationalism is in fact characteristic of the modern world, deriving from the nature of the state. He argues that the nation-state rests on membership of a particular ethnic or national group, and the exclusion of non-members, creating the potential for conflict. Containing detailed studies of Mexico, Iraq and Switzerland, this is an original contribution to a topical debate.

Why do poor people often vote against their material interests? This puzzle has been famously studied within wealthy Western democracies, yet the fact that the poor voter paradox also routinely manifests within poor countries has remained unexplored. This book studies how this paradox emerged in India, the world's largest democracy. Tariq Thachil shows how arguments from studies of wealthy democracies (such as moral values voting) and the global south (such as patronage or ethnic appeals) cannot explain why poor voters in poor countries support parties that represent elite policy interests. He instead draws on extensive survey data and fieldwork to document a novel strategy through which elite parties can recruit the poor, while retaining the rich. He shows how these parties can win over disadvantaged voters by privately providing them with basic social services via grassroots affiliates. Such outsourcing permits the party itself to continue to represent the policy interests of their privileged base.
Extends the study of why poor citizens vote against their interests to the non-Western world
The first book to provide a theory of social services as an electoral strategy, explaining why parties use social services for electoral purposes, how services win votes, and when this strategy succeeds or fails
Offers a comparison of religious parties across a diverse set of cases (India, Egypt, Yemen and Indonesia)

This volume examines the rise of Turkish power in Anatolia from the arrival of the first Turks at the end of the eleventh century to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Taking the period as a whole, the volume covers the political, economic, social, intellectual and cultural history of the region as the Byzantine empire crumbled and Anatolia passed into Turkish control to become the heartland of the Ottoman empire. In this way, the authors emphasise the continuities of the era rather than its dislocations, situating Anatolia within its geographic context at the crossroads of Central Asia, the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The world which emerges is one of military encounter, but also of cultural cohabitation, intellectual and diplomatic exchange, and political finesse. This is a state-of-the-art work of reference on an understudied period in Turkish history by some of the leading scholars in the field.

This compact 2010 volume covers the main developments in the social sciences since the Second World War. Chapters on economics, human geography, political science, psychology, social anthropology, and sociology will interest anyone wanting short, accessible histories of those disciplines, all written by experts in the relevant field; they will also make it easy for readers to make comparisons between disciplines. A final chapter proposes a blueprint for a history of the social sciences as a whole. Whereas most of the existing literature considers the social sciences in isolation from one other, this volume shows that they have much in common; for example, they have responded to common problems using overlapping methods, and cross-disciplinary activities have been widespread.

Like the postcolonial world more generally, Southeast Asia exhibits tremendous variation in state capacity and authoritarian durability. Ordering Power draws on theoretical insights dating back to Thomas Hobbes to develop a unified framework for explaining both of these political outcomes. States are especially strong and dictatorships especially durable when they have their origins in 'protection pacts': broad elite coalitions unified by shared support for heightened state power and tightened authoritarian controls as bulwarks against especially threatening and challenging types of contentious politics. These coalitions provide the elite collective action underpinning strong states, robust ruling parties, cohesive militaries, and durable authoritarian regimes - all at the same time. Comparative-historical analysis of seven Southeast Asian countries (Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Vietnam, and Thailand) reveals that subtly divergent patterns of contentious politics after World War II provide the best explanation for the dramatic divergence in Southeast Asia's contemporary states and regimes.

This book argues that community can exist at the international level, and that states dwelling within an international community have the capacity to develop a pacific disposition. The contributors provide an exhaustive regional and historical survey of places where states have come to expect peace, where they are working to foster such expectations, and where peace is hoped for rather than expected. This volume is an important contribution to international relations theory and security studies, providing a new vision of the possibilities for peaceful relations among states.

The 'long nineteenth century' (1776-1914) was a period of political, economic, military and cultural revolutions that re-forged both domestic and international societies. Neither existing international histories nor international relations texts sufficiently register the scale and impact of this 'global transformation', yet it is the consequences of these multiple revolutions that provide the material and ideational foundations of modern international relations. Global modernity reconstituted the mode of power that underpinned international order and opened a power gap between those who harnessed the revolutions of modernity and those who were denied access to them. This gap dominated international relations for two centuries and is only now being closed. By taking the global transformation as the starting point for international relations, this book repositions the roots of the discipline and establishes a new way of both understanding and teaching the relationship between world history and international relations.