Towards the 2017 French election: Socialist and Republican nominees from the selection to the presidential election

In France, primaries have become an important part of French party system. Recently, the process, used by different parties, has been opened also to sympathisers. Indeed, both the Socialist Party and the Republicans organised primaries in the 2017 presidential elections. This can be analysed as an expected step to address problems such as leadership and representativeness. In addition, this process is also in line with the personalisation that has become a characteristic of the Fifth Republic. However, after the collapse of the main parties in the last elections, the primary system seems to have entered in a crisis time. For this reason, this article will attempt to analyse the introduction of primaries in France with a particular attention on the last presidential election focusing on the similarities, differences, and effects in these two open selections

Continuous versus Discrete Market Games

De Meyer and Moussa Saley [4] provide an endogenous justification for the appearance of Brownian Motion in Finance by modeling the strategic interaction between two asymmetrically informed market makers with a zero-sum repeated game with one-sided information. The crucial point of this justification is the appearance of the normal distribution in the asymptotic behavior of Vn(P)//n. In De Meyer and Moussa Saley’s model [4], agents can fix a price in a continuous space. In the real world however, the market compels the agents to post prices in a discrete set. The previous remark raises the following question: Does the normal density still appear in the asymptotic of Vn//n for the discrete market game? The main topic of this paper is to prove that for all discretization of the price set, Vn(P)//n converges uniformly to 0. Despite of this fact, we do not reject De Meyer, Moussa analysis: when the size of the discretization step is small as compared to n-1/2, the continuous market game is a good approximation of the discrete one.Insider trading, game of incomplete information, Brownian Motion

Duality and optimal strategies in the finitely repeated zero-sum games with incomplete information on both sides

The recursive formula for the value of the zero-sum repeated games with incomplete information on both sides is known for a long time. As it is explained in the paper, the usual proof of this formula is in a sense non constructive : it just claims that the players are unable to guarantee a better payoff than the one prescribed by formula, but it does not indicates how the players can guarantee this amount. In this paper we aim to give a constructive approach to this formula using duality techniques. This will allow us to recursively describe the optimal strategies in those games and to apply these results to games with infinite action spaces.Repeated games, dual games, incomplete information, recurrence formula.

A study on fiber-arrangement close to the root of a sharp notch, for short fiber-reinforced thermoplastics

An approach, which aims at the morphological characterization near the sharp notch of specimens, has been developed for Short Fiber-Reinforced Thermoplastics. This work is directly related to the fa- tigue behavior of such materials, since the early stages of the cyclic damage are strictly influenced by the local microstructure at the stress concentration sites. Therefore, a comprehensive description of fi- bers\u2019 arrangement is needed in order to proceed with a modeling activity for the lifetime duration esti- mation. To this end, a semi-automatic tool has been developed, which is capable of evaluating fiber- arrangements through statistical descriptors, after submitting 2D pictures of the notch-tip area. Particu- larly, the attention was focused onto the nearest neighbor distance distribution function and onto a new formulation, which gives information about the level of the fiber-clustering phenomenon. On this basis, the repeatability of results has been evaluated with the goal of stating whether such information can be inherited by lifetime estimating models

Detecting planets around stars in nearby galaxies

The only way to detect planets around stars at distances of several kpc is by (photometric or astrometric) microlensing observations. In this paper, we show that the capability of photometric microlensing extends to the detection of signals caused by planets around stars in nearby galaxies (e.g. M31) and that there is no other method that can achieve this. Due to the large crowding, microlensing experiments towards M31 can only observe the high-magnification part of a lensing light curve. Therefore, the dominating channel for microlensing signals by planets is in distortions near the peak of high-magnification events as discussed by Griest and Safizadeh. We calculate the probability to detect planetary anomalies for microlensing experiments towards M31 and find that jupiter-like planets around stars in M31 can be detected. Though the characterization of the planet(s) involved in this signal will be difficult, the absence of such signals can yield strong constraints on the abundance of jupiter-like planets.Comment: 16 LaTex Pages, including 1 Postscript Figures, submitted to A&A; title changed, one more author added, completely revised version: central point is detecting planet in nearby galaxies and one more technique is taken into consideratio

The French Socialist Party: Membership between Closed and Open Primaries

For some years now the clamor for democratisation of parties' internal functioning has been spreading across democracies. Among them, France has advanced impressively in the past few years. In 2006, the Socialist Party (PS) launched a closed primary to choose the socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, for the 2007 presidential election. Approaching the 2012 presidential elections, the leftist coalition (PS and PRG) launched open primary elections to select its chief-executive candidates, with François Hollande finally emerging as a nominee. In this article, we shall examine how the socialist membership changed during the past three socialist congresses, analysing the outcome of the two above-mentioned primary elections. In particular, we shall observe the Le Mans (2005), Reims (2008) and Toulouse (2012) Congresses, and describe membership, participation, and competitiveness within the PS. The study was based on data collected from an administrative unit, the French départements