UFC Fighters Are Taking a Beating Because They are Misclassified as Independent Contractors. An Employee Classification Would Change the Fight Game for the UFC, Its Fighters, and MMA

The current state of affairs in the sport of mixed martial arts (MMA) is overwhelmingly in favor of the companies promoting the fights and not in favor of the athletes actually putting their health and lives at risk. This article looks at the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and how it classifies its fighters as independent contractors rather than employees, even though it treats the fighters more like employees. This article addresses issues fighters are having with the current classification and then examines how the fighters could be classified as employees. Finally, the article will address what an employee classification would mean for the UFC, its fighters, and MMA in general

A note on a.s. finiteness of perpetual integral functionals of diffusions

In this note, with the help of the boundary classification of diffusions, we derive a criterion of the convergence of perpetual integral functionals of transient real-valued diffusions. In the particular case of transient Bessel processes, we note that this criterion agrees with the one obtained via Jeulin's convergence lemma

Diffusion local time storage

In this paper we study a storage process or a liquid queue in which the input process is the local time of a positively recurrent stationary diffusion in stationary state and the potential output takes place with a constant deterministic rate. For this storage process we find its stationary distribution and compute the joint distribution of the starting and ending times of the busy and idle periods. This work completes and extends to a more general setting the results in Mannersalo, Norros, and Salminen (2003).Comment: 24 pages; to appear in Stoch. Proc. App

Irreversible Investment under L\'evy Uncertainty: an Equation for the Optimal Boundary

We derive a new equation for the optimal investment boundary of a general irreversible investment problem under exponential L\'evy uncertainty. The problem is set as an infinite time-horizon, two-dimensional degenerate singular stochastic control problem. In line with the results recently obtained in a diffusive setting, we show that the optimal boundary is intimately linked to the unique optional solution of an appropriate Bank-El Karoui representation problem. Such a relation and the Wiener Hopf factorization allow us to derive an integral equation for the optimal investment boundary. In case the underlying L\'evy process hits any real point with positive probability we show that the integral equation for the investment boundary is uniquely satisfied by the unique solution of another equation which is easier to handle. As a remarkable by-product we prove the continuity of the optimal investment boundary. The paper is concluded with explicit results for profit functions of (i) Cobb-Douglas type and (ii) CES type. In the first case the function is separable and in the second case non-separable.Comment: 19 page

Request for 2 New Cyrillic Characters for the Khanty and Nenets Languages

This is a proposal to add 2 characters to the international character encoding standard Unicode to represent Khanty and Nenets languages in Far North (Siberia). These additions were published in Unicode Standard version 7.0 in June 2014