Cubo 2/2009 [antikvár]

Preface Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences Mathematics and mathematical models have a very large field of applications. There is no scientific field which is not based on quantities which raises the need to use somé sort of quantitative method. Socal sciences alsó offer many opportunities of applying mathematical tools. These method can vary from very simple algebric manipulations to sophisticated dynamics. This collection of papers cannot serve as a complete overview of mathematical methods and application fields in the social sciences area, it gives only a collection of individual works in this field. Hopefully the Readers will develop somé interest and will find this area challenging and rewarding enough to jóin the large family of researchers who devote their career and Academic future to this field. Homeland security became a part of our every-day life. The availability and secrecy of important information is a crucial element of success. The paper of Griechisch presents an algebric result which has an important role in designing safe coding. We alsó present somé papers discussing iV-person games, and in the case when no analytic tools are available, simulation methods are used. The paper of Szilágyi presents a systematic simulation study of a large class of iV-person games with crossing payoff functions. This group of games includes the very well known Chicken Game among others. Dal Forno and Merlone examine the interaction of agents in small teams with reward mechanism to increase competition. This is a very interesting study, which can be successfully used in creating creative and competitive working environment. Agent-based simulation is used in the paper by Szidarovszky and Zhao, in which the dynamic evolution of industrial clusters is examined. The complexity and the size of actual industries make it impossible to develop analytic results. The rest of the papers deals with the most common social science applications: economic modeling. The survey paper of Szidarovszky presents a comprehensive summary of the state of art of oligopoly theory including static and dynamic models, lack of information, information delays, partial cooperation and even somé learning processes. It might suggest somé interesting research topics for the interested Readers. Three papers deal with special oligopoly areas. The two papers by Chiarella and Szidarovszky introduce two additional