Polynomial Norms

In this paper, we study polynomial norms, i.e. norms that are the $d^{\text{th}}$ root of a degree-$d$ homogeneous polynomial $f$. We first show that a necessary and sufficient condition for $f^{1/d}$ to be a norm is for $f$ to be strictly convex, or equivalently, convex and positive definite. Though not all norms come from $d^{\text{th}}$ roots of polynomials, we prove that any norm can be approximated arbitrarily well by a polynomial norm. We then investigate the computational problem of testing whether a form gives a polynomial norm. We show that this problem is strongly NP-hard already when the degree of the form is 4, but can always be answered by testing feasibility of a semidefinite program (of possibly large size). We further study the problem of optimizing over the set of polynomial norms using semidefinite programming. To do this, we introduce the notion of r-sos-convexity and extend a result of Reznick on sum of squares representation of positive definite forms to positive definite biforms. We conclude with some applications of polynomial norms to statistics and dynamical systems

Pareto efficiency for the concave order and multivariate comonotonicity

In this paper, we focus on efficient risk-sharing rules for the concave dominance order. For a univariate risk, it follows from a comonotone dominance principle, due to Landsberger and Meilijson [25], that efficiency is characterized by a comonotonicity condition. The goal of this paper is to generalize the comonotone dominance principle as well as the equivalence between efficiency and comonotonicity to the multi-dimensional case. The multivariate setting is more involved (in particular because there is no immediate extension of the notion of comonotonicity) and we address it using techniques from convex duality and optimal transportation