Resolute refinements of social choice correspondences

Many classical social choice correspondences are resolute only in the case of two alternatives and an odd number of individuals. Thus, in most cases, they admit several resolute refinements, each of them naturally interpreted as a tie-breaking rule, satisfying different properties. In this paper we look for classes of social choice correspondences which admit resolute refinements fulfilling suitable versions of anonymity and neutrality. In particular, supposing that individuals and alternatives have been exogenously partitioned into subcommittees and subclasses, we find out arithmetical conditions on the sizes of subcommittees and subclasses that are necessary and sufficient for making any social choice correspondence which is efficient, anonymous with respect to subcommittees, neutral with respect to subclasses and possibly immune to the reversal bias admit a resolute refinement sharing the same properties.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1503.0402

Enumeration of Standard Young Tableaux

A survey paper, to appear as a chapter in a forthcoming Handbook on Enumeration.Comment: 65 pages, small correction

A simple model of trees for unicellular maps

We consider unicellular maps, or polygon gluings, of fixed genus. A few years ago the first author gave a recursive bijection transforming unicellular maps into trees, explaining the presence of Catalan numbers in counting formulas for these objects. In this paper, we give another bijection that explicitly describes the "recursive part" of the first bijection. As a result we obtain a very simple description of unicellular maps as pairs made by a plane tree and a permutation-like structure. All the previously known formulas follow as an immediate corollary or easy exercise, thus giving a bijective proof for each of them, in a unified way. For some of these formulas, this is the first bijective proof, e.g. the Harer-Zagier recurrence formula, the Lehman-Walsh formula and the Goupil-Schaeffer formula. We also discuss several applications of our construction: we obtain a new proof of an identity related to covered maps due to Bernardi and the first author, and thanks to previous work of the second author, we give a new expression for Stanley character polynomials, which evaluate irreducible characters of the symmetric group. Finally, we show that our techniques apply partially to unicellular 3-constellations and to related objects that we call quasi-constellations.Comment: v5: minor revision after reviewers comments, 33 pages, added a refinement by degree of the Harer-Zagier formula and more details in some proof

Eulerian quasisymmetric functions

We introduce a family of quasisymmetric functions called {\em Eulerian quasisymmetric functions}, which specialize to enumerators for the joint distribution of the permutation statistics, major index and excedance number on permutations of fixed cycle type. This family is analogous to a family of quasisymmetric functions that Gessel and Reutenauer used to study the joint distribution of major index and descent number on permutations of fixed cycle type. Our central result is a formula for the generating function for the Eulerian quasisymmetric functions, which specializes to a new and surprising $q$-analog of a classical formula of Euler for the exponential generating function of the Eulerian polynomials. This $q$-analog computes the joint distribution of excedance number and major index, the only of the four important Euler-Mahonian distributions that had not yet been computed. Our study of the Eulerian quasisymmetric functions also yields results that include the descent statistic and refine results of Gessel and Reutenauer. We also obtain $q$-analogs, $(q,p)$-analogs and quasisymmetric function analogs of classical results on the symmetry and unimodality of the Eulerian polynomials. Our Eulerian quasisymmetric functions refine symmetric functions that have occurred in various representation theoretic and enumerative contexts including MacMahon's study of multiset derangements, work of Procesi and Stanley on toric varieties of Coxeter complexes, Stanley's work on chromatic symmetric functions, and the work of the authors on the homology of a certain poset introduced by Bj\"orner and Welker.Comment: Final version; to appear in Advances in Mathematics; 52 pages; this paper was originally part of the longer paper arXiv:0805.2416v1, which has been split into three paper