US warfare in Somalia and the trade-off between casualty-aversion and civilian protection

This article examines the ways in which the two normative concerns of casualty-aversion and civilian protection influenced US military strategy in the particular context of the asymmetric conflict in Somalia in the early 1990s. The article critically evaluates US military operations through the prism of international humanitarian law and examines whether American forces started prioritizing casualty-aversion over the safeguarding of Somali civilians. Finally, by drawing on emerging moral guidelines (such as Michael Walzer's idea of ‘due care’), the article examines whether lower numbers of Somali civilian deaths could have been achieved if marginal increases to the risks faced by US soldiers had been accepted.     

Lost through non-translation: bringing Clausewitz's writings on ‘new wars’ back in

While Carl von Clausewitz has generally been respected as one of the most profound philosophers of war, his expertise has been regarded as somewhat limited if not even irrelevant to the so-called ‘new wars’ of the post-Cold War world. Many scholars in international relations have claimed that ‘new wars’ are essentially ‘post-Clausewitzian’ and ‘post-trinitarian’ in nature, meaning that they are no longer fathomable through a Clausewitzian framework. However Clausewitz's earlier writings were nearly exclusively dedicated to guerrilla warfare, or what he called ‘small wars’. These writings have been largely overlooked by many analysts of contemporary conflicts. By drawing on his rare and untranslated writings, the article uncovers a critical part of Clausewitz's expertise in asymmetric warfare and shows that, far from being irrelevant in an age where interstate warfare is increasingly being replaced by conflicts between states and semi-/non-state actors, Clausewitz's philosophical writings actually shed new light into the particular interactive dynamics generated during wars waged under conditions of asymmetry.     

Efficient distributions of arms‐control inspection effort

A rule that constrains decision‐makers is enforced by an inspector who is supplied with a fixed level of inspection resources—inspection personnel, equipment, or time. How should the inspector distribute its inspection resources over several independent inspectees? What minimum level of resources is required to deter all violations? Optimal enforcement problems occur in many contexts; the motivating application for this study is the role of the International Atomic Energy Agency in support of the Treaty on the Non‐Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Using game‐theoretic models, the resource level adequate for deterrence is characterized in a two‐inspectee problem with inspections that are imperfect in the sense that violations can be missed. Detection functions, or probabilities of detecting a violation, are assumed to be increasing in inspection resources, permitting optimal allocations over inspectees to be described both in general and in special cases. When detection functions are convex, inspection effort should be concentrated on one inspectee chosen at random, but when they are concave it should be spread deterministicly over the inspectees. Our analysis provides guidance for the design of arms‐control verification operations, and implies that a priori constraints on the distribution of inspection effort can result in significant inefficiencies. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2004.     

网络游戏赌博性质分析

网络游戏产业快速发展的同时,赌博现象混迹其中。网络游戏赌博与传统赌博只是形式上的不同,其实质就是一种赌博行为。只有从教育、法制、监督、自律四方面综合治理,才能使这个行业健康发展。     

军用认知无线电网络中功率控制博弈算法的探讨

通过对比军用认知无线功率控制博弈模型与一些经典的功率控制博弈算法,提出了一种认知无线电网络中的功率控制的博弈算法。通过仿真结果性能分析,证明算法具有一定的优越性,并且能够为军事无线通信提供一定的理论依据和现实作用。     

Efficiency of equilibria in restricted uniform machine scheduling with total weighted completion time as social cost

In the last decade, there has been much progress in understanding scheduling problems in which selfish jobs aim to minimize their individual completion time. Most of this work has focused on makespan minimization as social objective. In contrast, we consider as social cost the total weighted completion time, that is, the sum of the agent costs, a standard definition of welfare in economics. In our setting, jobs are processed on restricted uniform parallel machines, where each machine has a speed and is only capable of processing a subset of jobs; a job's cost is its weighted completion time; and each machine sequences its jobs in weighted shortest processing time (WSPT) order. Whereas for the makespan social cost the price of anarchy is not bounded by a constant in most environments, we show that for our minsum social objective the price of anarchy is bounded above by a small constant, independent of the instance. Specifically, we show that the price of anarchy is exactly 2 for the class of unit jobs, unit speed instances where the finite processing time values define the edge set of a forest with the machines as nodes. For the general case of mixed job strategies and restricted uniform machines, we prove that the price of anarchy equals 4. From a classical machine scheduling perspective, our results establish the same constant performance guarantees for WSPT list scheduling. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2012     

地方物流供应商“偷懒”行为监管机制研究

军民融合现代军事物流体系中,地方物流供应商往往会"偷懒",这必将损害军民融合现代军事物流体系的整体绩效。首先描述了"偷懒"行为及其危害性,从机制入手,基于博弈论建立地方物流供应商"偷懒"行为监管机制;分析并证明了监管机制的有效性。这一机制的构建对于监管地方物流供应商具有重要作用。     

Reconciling strategic studies … with itself: a common framework for choosing among strategies

Three distinct, and seemingly irreconcilable, schools of thought are identified within the strategic studies literature. One which searches for “universal principles of war,” a second, “context-dependent,” approach that seeks to embed each instance of warfare within its concurrent social, political, technological milieu and, finally a “paradoxical logic” school, which equates strategy with the generation of uncertainty. The author offers some intuitive concepts from non-cooperative game theory to develop a “dominate-mix” approach to strategy choice. In doing so, he helps to reconcile these disparate approaches and provides a simple framework to assist researchers in framing military decisions as well as to assist planners in choosing among strategies.     

Interchange fee rate,merchant discount rate,and retail price in a credit card network: A game‐theoretic analysis

We consider two game‐theoretic settings to determine the optimal values of an issuer's interchange fee rate, an acquirer's merchant discount rate, and a merchant's retail price in a credit card network. In the first setting, we investigate a two‐stage game problem in which the issuer and the acquirer first negotiate the interchange fee rate, and the acquirer and the retailer then determine their merchant discount rate and retail price, respectively. In the second setting, motivated by the recent US bill “H.R. 2695,” we develop a three‐player cooperative game in which the issuer, the acquirer, and the merchant form a grand coalition and bargain over the interchange fee rate and the merchant discount rate. Following the cooperative game, the retailer makes its retail pricing decision. We derive both the Shapley value‐ and the nucleolus‐characterized, and globally‐optimal unique rates for the grand coalition. Comparing the two game settings, we find that the participation of the merchant in the negotiation process can result in the reduction of both rates. Moreover, the stability of the grand coalition in the cooperative game setting may require that the merchant should delegate the credit card business only to the issuer and the acquirer with sufficiently low operation costs. We also show that the grand coalition is more likely to be stable and the U.S. bill “H.R. 2695” is thus more effective, if the degree of division of labor in the credit card network is higher as the merchant, acquirer, and issuer are more specialized in the retailing, acquiring, and issuing operations, respectively. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2012     

一种基于博弈论的无线网状网络路由与信道分配联合优化算法

无线网络中的路由与信道分配可极大地影响网络的性能.为了解决无线网状网络中的路由与信道分配问题,提出并研究了一种称为CRAG(基于博弈论的无线网状网络路由与信道分配联合优化)的方法.CRAG采用协同博弈的方式将网络中的每个节点模型化为一个弈者,每个弈者的策略为与其相关的路由与信道分配方案,收益函数为给定流量需求矩阵下的成功传输流量.弈者通过协同博弈来优化收益函数以最大化网络的吞吐量.基于NS3的仿真结果表明,CRAG在收敛性、时延、丢包率和吞吐量方面优于其他当前的算法,从而证明了协同博弈的方法可以用于无线网状网络的路由与信道分配联合优化,并有效地改进网络性能.