A text that emphasizes the importance of case studies in social science scholarship and shows how to make case study practices more rigorous.

Public economics studies how government taxing and spending activities affect the economy―economic efficiency and the distribution of income and wealth. This comprehensive text on public economics covers the core topics of market failure and taxation as well as recent developments in both policy and the academic literature. It is unique not only in its broad scope but in its balance between public finance and public choice and its combination of theory and relevant empirical evidence.

The b...

A comprehensive introduction to using the tools and techniques of neuroscience to understand how consumers make decisions about purchasing goods and services. Contrary to the assumptions of economists, consumers are not always rational actors who make decisions in their own best interests. The new field of behavioral economics draws on the insights of psychology to study non-rational decision making. The newer field of consumer neuroscience draws on the findings, tools, and techniques of neur...

An impassioned look at games and game design that offers the most ambitious framework for understanding them to date.

Exploring the creativity of mind through children's language: how the tiniest utterances can illustrate the simple but abstract principles behind modern grammar-and reveal the innate structures of the mind. Every sentence we hear is instantly analyzed by an inner grammar; just as a prism refracts a beam of light, grammar divides a stream of sound, linking diverse strings of information to different domains of mind-memory, vision, emotions, intentions. In The Prism of Grammar, Tom Roeper bring...

How interventions based on objects including chemicals, financial products, and consumer goods offer a path to rethink European integration.

Interventions based on objects, Brice Laurent claims, have become a dominant path for European policy-making. In European Objects, Laurent analyzes the political consequences of these interventions and their democratization. He uses the term European objects to describe technical entities that are regulated and thereby transformed by European policies. T...

A comprehensive introduction to machine learning that uses probabilistic models and inference as a unifying approach. Today's Web-enabled deluge of electronic data calls for automated methods of data analysis. Machine learning provides these, developing methods that can automatically detect patterns in data and then use the uncovered patterns to predict future data. This textbook offers a comprehensive and self-contained introduction to the field of machine learning, based on a unified, proba...

The sixth edition of the foundational reference on cognitive neuroscience, with entirely new material that covers the latest research, experimental approaches, and measurement methodologies. Each edition of this classic reference has proved to be a benchmark in the developing field of cognitive neuroscience. The sixth edition of The Cognitive Neurosciences continues to chart new directions in the study of the biological underpinnings of complex cognition-the relationship between the structura...

A pioneer in interaction design tells the stories of designers who changed the way people use everyday things in the digital era, interviewing the founders of Google, the creator of The Sims, the inventors and developers of the mouse and the desktop, and many others. Digital technology has changed the way we interact with everything from the games we play to the tools we use at work. Designers of digital technology products no longer regard their job as designing a physical object-beautiful o...

A general framework for constructing and using probabilistic models of complex systems that would enable a computer to use available information for making decisions.