Viewing from the bad side: every expert might have been just a babbling equilibrium. On the good side, we can all be the expert:

There’s the theory that with perfect competition and perfect information, in a standard one item model, seller would set price = marginal cost and social surplus is going to be maximized. A similar intuition explained using general equilibrium has been given in an Arrow paper. But nothing is perfect, right? I think the story is quite simple, though not necessarily true: a large selling platform can use its market power to force sellers equate their price across channels. But because the platform charges a large comission rate, sellers would have to raise price uniformly on other cheaper channels too. ...

Today is the world cup final. I will be watching it from the air :( This year’s world cup comes with a complementary halftime show Why the World Cup half-time show may be a taste of things to come Annabel Rackham, BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyr498vqqpo Half-time at a football game is normally a chance to grab a drink or snack, make a mad dash for the toilets or vent with friends about some questionable refereeing or defending. ...

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C major (Op. 21) premiered in Vienna in 1800, when he was pushing thirty and already a known quantity as a pianist. It’s a perfectly nice symphony. That’s kind of the problem. You put it on expecting Beethoven and you get Haydn — sunny C major, the same tidy phrases, and with wind-up-the-clock development. Which makes sense: Haydn was his teacher, Mozart was in the air, and this is Beethoven doing the assignment very, very well. ...

I think one of advisors’ worst nightmares is to edit student’s thesis. Even Mozart had to deal with his lovely, talented student’s compositions: Here’s What ‘the Most Important Mozart Discovery in Decades’ Sounds Like NY Times Link Jeffrey Arlo Brown June 22 In 1778, a young musician named Marie-Louise-Philippine de Bonnières de Guînes was sitting in a composition lesson in Paris, trying to come up with a melody. She wracked her brains for 15 minutes. Finally, her teacher — Mozart — wrote the beginning of a tune and asked her to continue it. ...

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.) ...