https://www.markthompsonbooks.com/home daily 1.0 2026-07-08 https://www.markthompsonbooks.com/about daily 0.75 2026-07-08 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6a3b260a0c6bae1da26c65cb/8c553556-feba-4a37-978b-93452379081b/July+2014+at+Mount+Vernon.png https://www.markthompsonbooks.com/new-page daily 0.75 2026-06-24 https://www.markthompsonbooks.com/media daily 0.75 2026-07-07 https://www.markthompsonbooks.com/portfolio daily 0.75 2026-07-03 https://www.markthompsonbooks.com/portfolio/the-boss-in-american-government monthly 0.5 2026-06-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6a3b260a0c6bae1da26c65cb/079abde0-9db9-4515-af5c-111a8ab6006c/boss+book+%28tan2%29.png Publications - The Boss in American Government - The Boss in American Government: William M. Tweed and His Successors in Corruption from the 1860s to Today Who really runs a city? In New York between 1863 and 1871, the answer was William M. Tweed and his close associates—men who treated the municipal government as a private business and its treasury as their personal account. The machine they built, known then and since remembered as the "Tweed Ring," turned graft into a system: elections were bought, newspapers and legislators were paid both to support Ring actions and to look away from Ring crimes. By the time it was ousted, the Ring had caused economic harm estimated at at least $200 million --$5 billion in today's money -- to the city and its citizens. Tweed had himself stolen upwards of $20 million. He would die behind bars, broke and broken, at fifty-five. The techniques Tweed pioneered have outlived him by more than a century and a third, surfacing time and again in American politics and government. https://www.markthompsonbooks.com/portfolio/the-boss-in-american-government-jhdxm monthly 0.5 2026-06-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6a3b260a0c6bae1da26c65cb/6bda90de-68f8-467f-ba79-c87b512ee4d6/B-CAfPE+book+%28tan2%29+%281%29.png Publications - Disputed Decisions of World War II - Disputed Decisions of World War II: Decision Science and Game Theory Perspectives Great commanders can still make poor decisions about decisions themselves. This is the domain of meta-decision making: not the choice on the battlefield but the prior, hidden choice of how that choice gets made. On four occasions, the Allies got it wrong in instructive ways. At Dieppe in August 1942, a single division was thrown against the French coast in Operation Jubilee, and a closed circle of planners marched in lockstep toward disaster: groupthink in its purest form. The invasion of North Africa that November exposed a different flaw, the planning fallacy, as commanders on both sides of the Atlantic convinced themselves victory would come easily. Sicily, the following summer, revealed a third: a casual disregard for unity of command, the oldest principle in warfare and one decision science has only reaffirmed. And then Anzio, January 1944, where two-plus divisions went ashore in a landing that a clearer grasp of bluffing - of when a threat is real and when it is theater - might have rendered unnecessary altogether. https://www.markthompsonbooks.com/portfolio/the-boss-in-american-government-jhdxm-s859l monthly 0.5 2026-06-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6a3b260a0c6bae1da26c65cb/bee29380-d2a7-49b1-a661-6b53c14af1a9/WWII+book+%28tan2%29.png Publications - World War II Battles Reconsidered - World War II Battles Reconsidered: Game Theory and Decision Science Perspectives on Gazala, El Alamein, Falaise and Arnhem This book returns to four turning points of the Second World War and reads them through the logic of game theory and modern decision science, showing that victory and defeat often followed rules that can be named and tested. Consider Gazala, in the Libyan desert in the late spring of 1942: a defeat so total it has been called perhaps the most spectacular run of victories ever won against a British army. Its cause, in part, was a broken rule: Napoleon's Maxim, do not do what your enemy wishes you to. Months later and a country away, the British reversed their fortunes at El Alamein, and that comeback traces to a principle armies have honored for millennia and decision scientists still endorse today: unity of command. The pattern holds at Falaise in France in August 1944, where an Allied win fell short of what it might have been, undone by an overcautious instinct that three distinct kinds of fatigue may have bred. And at Arnhem in the Netherlands, just a month after, a costly Allied failure raises a pointed question game theory is well equipped to ask: is surprise on the battlefield worth as much as soldiers have always believed? Drawing on deep expertise in game theory and illustrated throughout with detailed maps, this book is a pioneering effort to bring the tools of decision science to bear on the pivotal battles of the Second World War. https://www.markthompsonbooks.com/portfolio/benefit-cost-analysis-for-program-evaluation monthly 0.5 2026-06-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6a3b260a0c6bae1da26c65cb/0ae2890a-0e7e-4641-8e06-9ce6909b9ba4/B-CAfPE+book+%28tan2%29.png Publications - Benefit-cost analysis for program evaluation - Benefit-cost analysis for program evaluation Benefit-cost analysis – also termed cost-benefit analysis – was first performed in 1667, when it was estimated that public health expenditures to combat the plague in England would achieve what would now be called a benefit-cost ratio of 84 to one. In the twentieth century in the U.S., legislation was enacted stipulating that public works projects were to be justified via comparison of estimated dollar-valued benefits versus costs. But such estimations entailed challenges: how should future benefits best be compared with present and future costs; how should the benefits of programs that beautify highways or that enhance life quality or that marginally reduce the likelihood of premature death be estimated in monetary terms? Methods for answering such questions – discounting future effects to determine their present-value equivalents and valuing program benefits by how much persons would be willing to pay for them – have been developed and used to guide governmental decisions.