Fuzzy and Multiobjective Games for Conflict Resolution

Decision makers in managerial and public organizations often encounter de­ cision problems under conflict or competition, because they select strategies independently or by mutual agreement and therefore their payoffs are then affected by the strategies of the other decision makers. This book presents some of the most important concepts in noncooperative games and cooperative games and introduces as well the latest advances in the new field of game theory in fuzzy and multiobjective environments. Several game representations and solution concepts are introduced which take the amgiguity and the multiplicity of objectives into consideration. The book also demonstrates the computational methods applied for obtaining the solutions. The reader can learn much about fuzzy and multiobjective games for conflict resolution in most realistic settings without prior mathematical sophistication. Decision makers in managerial and public organizations often encounter de­ cision problems under conflict or competition, because they select strategies independently or by mutual agreement and therefore their payoffs are then affected by the strategies of the other decision makers. Their interests do not always coincide and are at times even completely opposed. Competition or partial cooperation among decision makers should be considered as an essen­ tial part of the problem when we deal with the decision making problems in organizations which consist of decision makers with conflicting interests. Game theory has been dealing with such problems and its techniques have been used as powerful analytical tools in the resolution process of the decision problems. The publication of the great work by J. von Neumann and O. Morgen­ stern in 1944 attracted attention of many people and laid the foundation of game theory. We can see remarkable advances in the field of game theory for analysis of economic situations and a number of books in the field have been published in recent years. The aim of game theory is to specify the behavior of each player so as to optimize the interests of the player. It then recommends a set of solutions as strategies so that the actions chosen by each decision maker (player) lead to an outcome most profitable for himself or her­ self.