Analyzing Vertical Mergers to Avoid False Negatives: Three Recent Case Studies

This article analyzes three recent vertical mergers: a private antitrust case attacking the consummated merger of Jeld-Wen and Craftmaster Manufacturing Inc. (“CMI”) that was cleared by the DOJ in 2012 but subsequently litigated and won by the plaintiff, Steves & Sons in 2018; and two recent vertical merger matters investigated and cleared (with limited remedies) by 3-2 votes by the Federal Trade Commission in early 2019 -- Staples/Essendant and Fresenius/NxStage. There are some factual parallels among these three matters that make it interesting to analyze them together. First, the DOJ’s decision to clear Jeld-Wen/CMI merger appears to be a clear false negative, and the two dissenting Commissioner suggest that the recent FTC decisions similarly are false negatives. Second, the DOJ and possibly the FTC in Staples/Essendant may have overlooked the “Frankenstein Monster” scenario of input foreclosure. Third, both the DOJ and the FTC in Fresenius/NxStage also apparently relied on the absence of complaints in making their clearance decisions. The analysis of these mergers also suggests several policy implications involving the need to analyze the full range of anticompetitive concerns, the potential for merger retrospectives by independent (as opposed to staff) researchers, the height of the evidentiary burden on the agencies to show competitive harm in light of their limited budgets, and the need for greater transparency in Commission statements, as well as the potential errors in relying on a lack of complaints

Comment on "Electron spectral function and algebraic spin liquid for the normal state of underdoped$ high T_c superconductors"

Comment on the Letter by W. Rantner and X-G. Wen, Phys. Rev. Lett. v.86, p.3871 (2001).Comment: Latex, 1 pag

Transfer of three species of Cayratia Juss., to Causonis Raf.(Vitaceae)

Phylogenetic studies have shown that Cayratia Juss is not monophyletic. Cayratia s.str. is now confined to those species with a U-shaped endosperm rather than a T-shaped endosperm. The latter are now in three genera Causonis Raf., Pseudocayratia J. Wen, L.M. Lu & Z.D. Chen, together with an undescribed African genus. As a result, new combinations are required for three species occurring in Australia: Causonis clematidea (F. Muell.) Jackes, C. eurynema (B.L.Burtt) Jackes and C. maritima (Jackes) Jackes. Cayratia japonica (Thunb.) Gagnep., and Cayratia trifolia (L.) Domin, have been transferred to Causonis, as Causonis japonica (Thunb.) Raf., and Causonis trifolia (L.) Mabb. & J. Wen

The universal DAHA of type (C1∨,C1)(C_1^\vee,C_1) and Leonard triples

Assume that $\mathbb F$ is an algebraically closed field and $q$ is a nonzero scalar in $\mathbb F$ that is not a root of unity. The universal Askey--Wilson algebra $\triangle_q$ is a unital associative $\mathbb F$-algebra generated by $A,B, C$ and the relations state that each of $$A+\frac{q BC-q^{-1} CB}{q^2-q^{-2}}, \qquad B+\frac{q CA-q^{-1} AC}{q^2-q^{-2}}, \qquad C+\frac{q AB-q^{-1} BA}{q^2-q^{-2}}$$ is central in $\triangle_q$. The universal DAHA $\mathfrak H_q$ of type $(C_1^\vee,C_1)$ is a unital associative $\mathbb F$-algebra generated by $\{t_i^{\pm 1}\}_{i=0}^3$ and the relations state that \begin{gather*} t_it_i^{-1}=t_i^{-1} t_i=1 \quad \hbox{for all $i=0,1,2,3$}; \\ \hbox{$t_i+t_i^{-1}$ is central} \quad \hbox{for all $i=0,1,2,3$}; \\ t_0t_1t_2t_3=q^{-1}. \end{gather*} It was given an $\mathbb F$-algebra homomorphism $\triangle_q\to \mathfrak H_q$ that sends \begin{eqnarray*} A &\mapsto & t_1 t_0+(t_1 t_0)^{-1}, \\ B &\mapsto & t_3 t_0+(t_3 t_0)^{-1}, \\ C &\mapsto & t_2 t_0+(t_2 t_0)^{-1}. \end{eqnarray*} Therefore any $\mathfrak H_q$-module can be considered as a $\triangle_q$-module. Let $V$ denote a finite-dimensional irreducible $\mathfrak H_q$-module. In this paper we show that $A,B,C$ are diagonalizable on $V$ if and only if $A,B,C$ act as Leonard triples on all composition factors of the $\triangle_q$-module $V$.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2003.0625

Numerical Tests of the Chiral Luttinger Liquid Theory for Fractional Hall Edges

We report on microscopic numerical studies which support the chiral Luttinger liquid theory of the fractional Hall edge proposed by Wen. Our calculations are based in part on newly proposed and accurate many-body trial wavefunctions for the low-energy edge excitations of fractional incompressible states.Comment: 12 pages + 1 figure, Revte

Divide and Fuse: A Re-ranking Approach for Person Re-identification

As re-ranking is a necessary procedure to boost person re-identification (re-ID) performance on large-scale datasets, the diversity of feature becomes crucial to person reID for its importance both on designing pedestrian descriptions and re-ranking based on feature fusion. However, in many circumstances, only one type of pedestrian feature is available. In this paper, we propose a "Divide and use" re-ranking framework for person re-ID. It exploits the diversity from different parts of a high-dimensional feature vector for fusion-based re-ranking, while no other features are accessible. Specifically, given an image, the extracted feature is divided into sub-features. Then the contextual information of each sub-feature is iteratively encoded into a new feature. Finally, the new features from the same image are fused into one vector for re-ranking. Experimental results on two person re-ID benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Especially, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on the Market-1501 dataset.Comment: Accepted by BMVC201