Nash equilibria of games with monotonic best replies

We introduce notions of increasingness for the best reply of a game that capture properly the intuitive idea of complementarity among players’ strategies. We show, by generalizing the fixpoint theorems of Veinott and Zhou, that the Nash sets of our games with increasing best replies are nonempty complete lattices. Hence we extend the class of games with strategic complementarities.Complementarity, supermodular games, fixpoint theorem, Nash equilibria

Extend the ideas of Kan and Zhou paper on Optimal Portfolio Construction under parameter uncertainty

In this dissertation, we extend the ideas of Raymond Kan and Guofu Zhou for optimal portfolio construction under parameter uncertainty. Kan and Zhou proved analytically that under parameter uncertainty, investing in the sample tangency portfolio and the riskless is not optimal. Based on this idea we will approach the portfolio construction under parameter uncertainty in a different way. We will optimise the expected out-of-sample performance of a portfolio using a numerical approach. Using Monte Carlo simulations we will develop an algorithm that calculates the expected out-of-sample performance of any portfolio rule. We will then extend this algorithm in order to be able to input new portfolio rules and test their performance.\ud \ud The new portfolio rules we introduce are based on shrinkages for the mean and covariance matrix of the assets returns. These shrinkages will have some parameters that will be chosen so that we optimise the expected out-of-sample performance of the input portfolio rule. A comparison is then done between the portfolio rules we introduce and Kan and Zhou portfolio rules

Rethinking the Axial Age in Ancient China: The Role of Religion in Governance from the Shang to the Early Han

The Axial Age is a term often used to describe an intellectual golden age that occurred in the first millennium Before the Common Era. Thinkers in civilizations across the globe at that time contributed to a philosophical movement that is sometimes portrayed as an evolution from superstition to reason. However, this thesis focuses on the changing role of religion in regards to governance in Ancient China. Beginning with the first evidence of writing on oracle bones in the Shang Dynasty, religious ideas and practices were relied on by the Shang royal court. The spread of these religious artifacts is a testament to the growing power of the Shang. By claiming supernatural influence with the spirits and deities, the authority of the Shang king was strengthened. As the ritual of divining and crafting oracle bones became more routinized, these religious practices became politically important as well. The Zhou conquered the Shang and justified their newfound rule by claiming to be favored by Heaven. Their concept of Heaven incorporated all of the Shang spiritual pantheon, thereby reinforcing Zhou legitimacy. Zhou kings were expected to uphold the Mandate of Heaven not only by pleasing the spirits but also by providing for the people. Divination and ritual continued but did not have as much of an impact on governance as it did in the Shang. As the central Zhou state began to lose power, various states favored practical measures to strengthen their own political authority. Might determined right as states preferred military power instead of religious influence. Assimilation of outside peoples paired with increased social mobility also contributed to the waning influence of the Zhou state. The philosophical trends of the Hundred Schools of Thought mirrored this development. The idealistic ritual-based rule of the early Confucians was later displaced by the pragmatic law-based rule of the Legalists. Although the Qin state succeeded in uniting the warring states by utilizing clear laws and strict punishments, their reign was short-lived. The Han Dynasty inherited the legal bureaucracy from the Qin but fused that with religious ideas to serve as an ethicopolitical framework for their rule. This legacy served as a blueprint for dynastic rule that lasted over two thousand years

The <i>Xia Shang Zhou Duandai Gongcheng Baogao</i> 夏商周斷代工程報告 and Its Chronology of the Western Zhou Dynasty

The Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project was a five-year state-sponsored project, carried out between 1995–2000, to determine an absolute chronology of the Western Zhou dynasty and approximate chronologies of the Xia and Shang dynasties. At the end of the five years, the Project issued a provisional report entitled Report on the 1996–2000 Provisional Results of the Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project: Brief Edition detailing its results. A promised full report was finally published in 2022: Report on the Xia-Shang Zhou Chronology Project. Although numerous discoveries in the more than twenty years between the publications of the Brief Edition and the Report have revealed that the Project's absolute chronology of the Western Zhou is fundamentally flawed, and some of the problems are acknowledged by the Report, still the Report maintains the Project's chronology without any correction. In the review, I present four of these discoveries, from four different periods of the Western Zhou, discussing their implications for the Project's chronology. I conclude with a call for some sort of authoritative statement acknowledging the errors in the report. “夏商周斷代工程”是中國政府從 1995 年到 2000 年支持的五年學術項目，目的是為了判斷西周時代絕對年代框架以及夏代和商代的大約年代。在 2000 年，這個項目公布了一種階段性的報告，題做《夏商周斷代工程 1996–2000 年階段成果報告：簡本》。二十多年以後，在 2022 年“夏商周斷代工程”終於出版了正式報告，即《夏商周斷代工程報告》。正如《夏商周斷代工程報告》也承認的那樣，這二十多年以來眾多考古發現顯示了原來的西周年代框架含有嚴重問題，甚至有絕對錯誤。雖然如此，《夏商周斷代工程報告》毫無改變地繼承了《夏商周斷代工程 1996–2000 年階段成果報告：簡本》的年代框架。本文對二十年以來代表西周時代四個不同的階段的四種發現作簡單的介紹，及其對“夏商周斷代工程”的結論作評論。最後，我還指出根據學術道德，“夏商周斷代工程”的相關領導有責任公開地指出《夏商周斷代工程報告》的問題。</p

Study the effect of sliding frequency on reciprocating sliding wear test for titanium alloy Ti-6Al-4V

Titanium alloys are widely used in the aerospace, automotive, chemical and biomedical industries. Titanium and its alloys have excellent corrosion resistance towards many of the highly corrosive environments, particularly, oxidizing and chloride containing process streams due to their excellent combination of low density, high strength to weight ratio, corrosion resistance and biocompatibility (Feng & Xu, 2006). This material have evoked sufficient interest among tribologists due to their poor performance when subjected to wear (Argatov, 2011); (Chen & Zhou, 2001). Tribo contact between uncoated titanium alloy once the coated completely used are crucial and these need to be study and analyse

The Sacred and the Cannibalistic: Zhou Zuoren’s Critique of Violence in Modern China

This article explores the ways in which Zhou Zuoren critiqued violence in modern China as a belief-­‐‑driven phenomenon. Differing from Lu Xun and other mainstream intellectuals, Zhou consistently denied the legitimacy of violence as a force for modernizing China. Relying on extensive readings in anthropology, intellectual history, and religious studies, he investigated the fundamental “nexus” between violence and the religious, political, and ideological beliefs. In the Enlightenment’s effort to achieve modernity, cannibalistic Confucianism was to be cleansed from the corpus of Chinese culture as the “barbaric” cultural Other, but Zhou was convinced that such barbaric cannibalism was inherited by the Enlightenment thinkers, and thus made the Enlightenment impossible. Through critiquing the violence in intellectual persecution and everyday life, and through identifying modern intellectuals and the masses as the major sponsors and agents of violence, Zhou questioned the legitimacy of the mainstream Enlightenment, modern political movements, and national salvation by defining them as inherently irrational and violent

Detecting the intermediate-mass Higgs boson through the associate production channel pp --> t + anti-t + H + X

We examine the detection of the intermediate-mass Higgs boson (IMH) at LHC through the associate production channel pp-->t+(anti-t)+H+X-->l+photon+ photon+X'. It is shown that by applying kinematic cuts or b-tagging on the final state jets, the main backgrounds of W(-->l+nu)+photon+photon+(n-jet) can be reduced substantially without significant loss of signals. It is possible to detect the Higgs boson at LHC through the pp-->t+(anti-t)+H+X channel using a modest photon detector with mass resolution of about 3% of the photon pair invariant mass.Comment: 10 pages, standard LaTex fil