The 36th Stony Brook game theory conference features the New Perspectives on Algorithmic Game Theory Workshop. One of the most anticipated talks is Professor Gonczarowski’s “Quantifying Inefficiency,” Here’s my note: Setup A context is a pair $C=\bigl(X,(\succsim_i)_{i=1}^{n}\bigr)$ where $X$ is a nonempty finite set of alternatives, $n\in\mathbb{N}$, and each $\succsim_i$ is a preference over $\Delta(X)$ satisfying the von Neumann–Morgenstern axioms (hence admitting an expected-utility representation $u_i$, unique up to positive affine transformation). ...

Argentina beat England in the world cup semi final today! I like watching football, the people and their stories inspire me. There’s a saying goes, Russian literature dies in despair, while Latin American dance in despair. And if one footballer is going to get a Nobel Prize in literature, Di Maria is going to win: In the Rain, in the Cold, in the Dark Ángel Di María Club Atlético Rosario Central June 25 2018 https://www.theplayerstribune.com/articles/angel-di-maria-argentina-english ...

Metropolitan Opera House, NYC, July 14 There is a particular kind of disappointment reserved for a great company on an ordinary night: it’s not really failure, more like the sight of enormous ability held at half-throttle. American Ballet Theatre’s Swan Lake on Tuesday — Kevin McKenzie’s staging after Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, set to Tchaikovsky and led in the pit by Charles Barker — passed without any real mishap but also without much conviction. This is one of the finest ensembles in the world, and one felt throughout the evening how much more it had in reserve. ...

“Deh vieni, non tardar” is Susanna’s aria near the end of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. It’s Act IV, night, the garden. Susanna is dressed in the Countess’s clothes to trap the philandering Count Almaviva, and — she knows Figaro is hiding in the bushes watching, convinced she’s about to cheat on him. So she sings this: oh come, don’t delay, my beautiful joy… A melting serenade apparently to a secret lover. Figaro burns. But the whole thing is a wink — the “lover” she’s actually calling is Figaro, and the aria is a real love song disguised as a fake one. Mozart lets the audience hear the sincerity that the character on stage wouldn’t allowed to. ...

Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande (Op. 80) was written as an incidental music (aka BGM). In 1898 the actress Patrick Campbell staged Maeterlinck’s symbolist drama in London and asked Fauré to write for it. He was short on time, so he handed the orchestration of the small theatre band to his student Charles Koechlin, and only later sat down to orchestrate the concert suite himself. (Debussy, Schoenberg and Sibelius all wrote music for the same play. The play was popular.) ...

This is an encore of a performance with the New Jersey Symphony in May 2016. I think it’s by far the cleanest recording I’ve ever heard online. Hadelich plays too clean, sometimes it makes you feel it’s easy: The orchestra members' faces are full of awe it's such a pleasure to watch. Nováček’s perpetuum mobile gives a similar vibe with the 5th caprice: This is Henryk Szeryng. Perlman also has a great recording for this piece.

I come across a new interesting study in the Journal of Operations Management: "There Is More to Crowdshipping Than Money: Understanding How Operational Characteristics Influence Driver Behaviors" > By Nicolò Masorgo, David D. Dobrzykowski, Christopher S. Tang, and Brian S. Fugate. from an article in Ripple: Surge pricing is broken, but there’s a smarter way to match gig workers with consumers By Christopher S. Tang, David Dobrzykowski and Nicolo Masorgo, The Conversation ...

Today is the department’s phd econometrics core exam. Wish me luck! You can also make your own meme at https://imgflip.com

The market structure is complicated. Incentives are intertwined and I can’t just “feel” the equilibrium out. Nevertheless, maybe it’s fair to ask the question: What is the price of anarchy when transaction fees are nonzero? The following video doesn’t have the direct answer but is a good place to get thinking started

Born on this day in 1860, Gustav Mahler spent his life searching for the music that could contain everything – joy, grief, nature, eternity. (Berlin Phil)