Disclaimer: I don’t owe IP rights of any design images. My taste is personal and they’re for academic purposes only. My favourite design (though Beethoven should have been used for a 5 or 9 euro bill): This image is part of design proposal E, created by Myrsini Vardopoulou, and has been shortlisted by the ECB as a potential design for the third euro banknote series. (European Central Bank) ...
🍳 Source: State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) penalty decision (2026) No. 29, July 25, 2026. New Economists https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/ECujo_6Qt_CbJanZvB6EUw SAMR found Ctrip Group abused its dominant position in China’s online hotel booking platform market (China-only relevant market). Market dominance evidence: Market share consistently above 50% (GMV basis: 53–59% over 2020–2025) Highly concentrated market: HHI ~4,100–4,575; CR3 ~94–95 Strong control over pricing, traffic allocation, room inventory, and hotel sales channels The fouls: ...
Proabably not? A Theory of Stock Exchange Competition and Innovation: Will the Market Fix the Market? Budish, Lee and Shim (2024) JPE Reading Notes Context: exchanges today adopt the continuous limit order book trading mechanism, which generates latency arbitrage — rents from symmetrically disseminated public information — which fuels a socially wasteful speed race and taxes liquidity. A known fix exists (frequent batch auctions). Incumbent exchanges have not adopted it. Why not? ...
U of Chicago got another Fields Medal! The medalist videos are especially inspiring to watch: How deliberately the anime dolls face the camera is adorable. Inspiring mathematicians: “Mathematics is the queen of the sciences, and arithmetic is the queen of mathematics." —— Carl Friedrich Gauss “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty." —— Bertrand Russell “The essence of mathematics lies in its freedom." —— Georg Cantor ...
International students or frequent traveller would often take advantage of doing large purchases in the cheapest airport. But more importantly, exchange rates is an important financial lever. Recent interesting story from the Economist: A new Plaza for global currencies wouldn’t work https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/06/30/a-new-plaza-accord-for-global-currencies-wouldnt-work Just being curious, so a quick Google tells me: exchange rate is the price of currencies so technically it should also follow the supply and demand rule. Different mechanism operates in different time magnitude: ...
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. ...