This book primarily addresses various game theory phenomena in the context of management practice. As such, it helps readers identify the profound game theory principles behind these phenomena. At the same time, the game theory principles in the book can also provide a degree of guidance for solving practical problems.As one of the main areas in management research, there is already an extensive body of literature on game theory. However, it remains mainly theoretical, focusing on abstract arguments and purely numerical examples purely. This book addresses that gap, helping readers apply game theory in their actual management or research work.

Abstract: Monte Carlo (MC) simulation forms a very flexible and widely used computational method employed in many areas of science and engineering. The focus of this research is on the variance reduction technique of Control Variates (CV) which is a statistical approach used to improve the efficiency of MC simulation. We consider parametric estimation problems encountered in analysing stochastic systems where the stochastic system performance or its sensitivity depends on some model or decision parameter. Furthermore, we assume that the estimation is performed by one or more users at one or several parameter values. A store and reuse setting is introduced where at a set-up stage sonic information is gathered computationally and stored. The stored information is then used at the estimation phase by users to help with their estimation problems.Three problems in this setting are addressed. (i) An analysis of the user's choices at the estimation phase is provided. The information generated at the set-up phase is stored in the form of information about a set of random variables that can be used as control variates. Users need to decide whether, and if so how, to use the stored information. A so-called cost-adjusted mean squared error is used as a measure cost of the available estimators and user's decision is formulated as a constrained minimization problem. (ii) A recent approach to defining generic control variates in parametric estimation problems is generalized in two distinct directions: the first involves considering an alternative parametrization of the original problem through a change of probability measure. This parametrization is particularly relevant to sensitivity estimation problems with respect to model and decision parameters. In the second, for problems where the quantities of interest are defined on sample paths of stochastic processes that model the underlying stochastic dynamics, systematic control variate selection based on approximate dynamics is proposed. (iii) When common random inputs are used parametric estimation variables become statistically dependent. This dependence is explicitly modelled as a random field and conditions are derived to imply the effectiveness of estimation variables as control variates. Comparisons with the metamodeling approach of Kriging and recently proposed Stochastic Kriging that use similar inputs data to predict the mean of the estimation variable are provided.

With the advancement of technology, more and more degree programs are available in the form of online education. Despite its top ranking in online bachelors degree programs, Pennsylvania State Universitys World Campus presents a variety of challenges and opportunities related to students' experiences, feelings, and operation as a community of learners analogous to what is experienced by resident students. Towards the vision of creating a socially integrated online environment for students to work towards their online degree, I hypothesize that increased visibility of students relevant information for social interaction and shared identity attributes contributes to a more cohesive felt community. To investigate this general hypothesis, I first studied the potential connections and information needs among online students, as well as the practices for developing social relationship from the perspectives of instructors and students. Second, I designed and carried out formative evaluations of several interactive prototypes using visualizations of student data; these were designed to enhance awareness of peers with respect to different aspects of similarity or other grounds for affinity (e.g., shared timezone or geographic location, shared educational goals). In a related effort, I developed and validated two constructs of community that could be used to assess felt community in the context of online learning context, including attention to both feelings of affinity or personal ties and beliefs about the capacities of the online community. The instruments were created to assess the impact of my design efforts at making such connections visible.Finally, working from my earlier findings I designed a new set of tools that included both a peer communication and collaboration space built in Slack Workspace WeAre! and a custom set of web visualizations that convey different facets of similarity to one's peers, which is aimed to inform and invite social interaction and to promote community feelings. I fielded this last set of designs to World Campus students, collecting a mix of self-report measures (e.g., pre- and post-usage measures; open-ended comments from tool users) and a range of activity data gathered during tool use (e.g., messages exchanged, access to the custom Web tools). Combining across these multiple forms of data, and contrasting the survey data of those who did and did join the Slack space, I identified factors that influence the adoption and use of Slack Workspace, and also investigated the effect of design interventions in promoting felt community. I discuss who was most likely to take advantage of the Slack WeAre! space, how they used it, and to what extent the custom Web tools were useful in raising awareness and promoting interaction.

In the last two decades, with the high speed urbanization, walled residential compound as the typical housing development is being constructed on a large scale in peripheral areas of Chinese cities. Its self-enclosing nature and large scale bring some negative aspects to the city and the community itself, such as traffic congestion, inconvenience of public transportation, lack of street life, redundancy and exclusiveness of public amenities. However, the existence of enclosing perimeter has its historical context and contemporary causes. Instead of completely rejecting "walled community" as a viable typology, this thesis aims to develop a guideline that can transform the "wall" and to arrive at an optimum semi-walled residential compound typology.