Branes are Waves and Monopoles

In a recent paper it was shown that fundamental strings are null waves in Double Field Theory. Similarly, membranes are waves in exceptional extended geometry. Here the story is continued by showing how various branes are Kaluza-Klein monopoles of these higher dimensional theories. Examining the specific case of the E7 exceptional extended geometry, we see that all branes are both waves and monopoles. Along the way we discuss the O(d; d) transformation of localized brane solutions not associated to an isometry and how true T-duality emerges in Double Field Theory when the background possesses isometries.Comment: 32 pages, Latex, v2, typos correcte

What Determines the ZEW Indicator?

This paper analyzes which factors are driving the ZEW Indicator of Economic Sentiment. Using the results of a poll among survey participants as well as Granger causality tests we identify three groups of influence factors: other sentiment indicators, financial variables and real economy data. In a second step these factors are used to estimate out-of-sample forecasts for the ZEW Indicator. We find that a simple model that includes German manufacturing order data, the German yield structure and the US Consumer Confidence indicator as explanatory variables is able to outperform a naive univariate benchmark model as well as the consensus forecast for the ZEW Indicator as published by news agencies. --leading indicators,Germany,zew,forecasting

Simplicity-Expressiveness Tradeoffs in Mechanism Design

A fundamental result in mechanism design theory, the so-called revelation principle, asserts that for many questions concerning the existence of mechanisms with a given outcome one can restrict attention to truthful direct revelation-mechanisms. In practice, however, many mechanism use a restricted message space. This motivates the study of the tradeoffs involved in choosing simplified mechanisms, which can sometimes bring benefits in precluding bad or promoting good equilibria, and other times impose costs on welfare and revenue. We study the simplicity-expressiveness tradeoff in two representative settings, sponsored search auctions and combinatorial auctions, each being a canonical example for complete information and incomplete information analysis, respectively. We observe that the amount of information available to the agents plays an important role for the tradeoff between simplicity and expressiveness

Generalised Kinematics for Double Field Theory

We formulate a kinematical extension of Double Field Theory on a $2d$-dimensional para-Hermitian manifold $(\mathcal{P},\eta,\omega)$ where the $O(d,d)$ metric $\eta$ is supplemented by an almost symplectic two-form $\omega$. Together $\eta$ and $\omega$ define an almost bi-Lagrangian structure $K$ which provides a splitting of the tangent bundle $T\mathcal{P}=L\oplus\tilde{L}$ into two Lagrangian subspaces. In this paper a canonical connection and a corresponding generalised Lie derivative for the Leibniz algebroid on $T\mathcal{P}$ are constructed. We find integrability conditions under which the symmetry algebra closes for general $\eta$ and $\omega$, even if they are not flat and constant. This formalism thus provides a generalisation of the kinematical structure of Double Field Theory. We also show that this formalism allows one to reconcile and unify Double Field Theory with Generalised Geometry which is thoroughly discussed.Comment: 41 pages, v2: typos corrected, references added, published versio