Additively Separable Hedonic Games with Social Context

In hedonic games, coalitions are created as a result of the strategic interaction of independent players. In particular, in additively separable hedonic games, every player has valuations for all other ones, and the utility for belonging to a coalition is given by the sum of the valuations for all other players belonging to it. So far, non-cooperative hedonic games have been considered in the literature only with respect to totally selfish players. Starting from the fundamental class of additively separable hedonic games, we define and study a new model in which, given a social graph, players also care about the happiness of their friends: we call this class of games social context additively separable hedonic games (SCASHGs). We focus on the fundamental stability notion of Nash equilibrium, and study the existence, convergence and performance of stable outcomes (with respect to the classical notions of price of anarchy and price of stability) in SCASHGs. In particular, we show that SCASHGs are potential games, and therefore Nash equilibria always exist and can be reached after a sequence of Nash moves of the players. Finally, we provide tight or asymptotically tight bounds on the price of anarchy and the price of stability of SCASHGs.

The reduced Dijkgraaf–Witten invariant of twist knots in the Bloch group of a finite field

Let [Formula: see text] be a closed oriented 3-manifold and let [Formula: see text] be a discrete group. We consider a representation [Formula: see text]. For a 3-cocycle [Formula: see text], the Dijkgraaf–Witten invariant is given by [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] is the map induced by [Formula: see text], and [Formula: see text] denotes the fundamental class of [Formula: see text]. Note that [Formula: see text], where [Formula: see text] is the map induced by [Formula: see text], we consider an equivalent invariant [Formula: see text], and we also regard it as the Dijkgraaf–Witten invariant. In 2004, Neumann described the complex hyperbolic volume of [Formula: see text] in terms of the image of the Dijkgraaf–Witten invariant for [Formula: see text] by the Bloch–Wigner map from [Formula: see text] to the Bloch group of [Formula: see text]. In this paper, by replacing [Formula: see text] with a finite field [Formula: see text], we calculate the reduced Dijkgraaf–Witten invariants of the complements of twist knots, where the reduced Dijkgraaf–Witten invariant is the image of the Dijkgraaf–Witten invariant for SL[Formula: see text] by the Bloch–Wigner map from [Formula: see text] to the Bloch group of [Formula: see text].

Weak convergence of delay SDEs with applications to Carathéodory approximation

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>In this paper, we consider a fundamental class of stochastic differential equations with time delays. Our aim is to investigate the weak convergence with respect to delay parameter of the solutions. Based on the techniques of Malliavin calculus, we obtain an explicit estimate for the rate of convergence. An application to the Carathéodory approximation scheme of stochastic differential equations is provided as well.</p>

2. Milkiness, muddiness, and inkiness

‘Milkiness, muddiness, and inkiness’ discusses the phenomena of ‘muddiness’ and ‘inkiness’, which are both examples of ‘colloids’—the fundamental class of soft matter constituted by dispersing very small particles of solid matter in a liquid environment. The colloidal state provided the final evidence that atoms existed. Michael Faraday gave a well-known lecture on the ‘Brownian Motion’ and he also researched gold colloids which show how small particles disperse. Albert Einstein came up with a theory of thermal noise, and Charles Perrin carried out a famous experiment in 1908 on this topic. Both Einstein and Perrin showed that colloidal particles can do everything that molecules do, but at a thousand times the size, and equally more slowly.

The Kasparov product on submersions of open manifolds

We study the Kasparov product on (possibly non-compact and incomplete) Riemannian manifolds. Specifically, we show on a submersion of Riemannian manifolds that the tensor sum of a regular vertically elliptic operator on the total space and an elliptic operator on the base space represents the Kasparov product of the corresponding classes in [Formula: see text]-theory. This construction works in general for symmetric operators (i.e. without assuming self-adjointness), and extends known results for submersions with compact fibers. The assumption of regularity for the vertically elliptic operator is not always satisfied, but depends on the topology and geometry of the submersion, and we give explicit examples of non-regular operators. We apply our main result to obtain a factorization in unbounded [Formula: see text]-theory of the fundamental class of a Riemannian submersion, as a Kasparov product of the shriek map of the submersion and the fundamental class of the base manifold.