It has been an open question whether the family of merit functions $\psi _p\(p> 1) $, the generalized Fischer-Burmeister (FB) merit function, associated to the second-order cone is smooth or not. In this paper we answer it partly, and show that \psi _p is smooth for \psi _p , and we provide the condition for its coerciveness. Numerical results are reported to illustrate the influence of \psi _p on the performance of the merit function method based on \psi _p .

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This paper studies the eect of risk-aversion in the competitive newsvendor game. Multiple newsvendors with risk-averse preferences face a random demand and the demand is allocated proportionally to their inventory levels. Each newsvendor aims to maximize his expected utility instead of his expected prot. Assuming a general form of risk-averse utility function, we prove that there exists a pure Nash equilibrium in this game, and it is also unique under certain conditions. We nd that the order quantity of each newsvendor is decreasing in the degree of risk-aversion and increasing in the initial wealth. Newsvendors with moderate preferences of risk-aversion make more prots compared with the risk-neutral situation. We also discuss the joint eect of risk-aversion and competition. If the eect of risk-aversion is strong enough to dominate the eect of competition, the total inventory level under competition will be lower than that under centralized decision-making.

Symmetric polynomials are polynomials that are invariant under the action of the symmetric group, and they play an integral role in mathematics. The space of quasiin- variant polynomials, polynomials that are invariant under the action of the symmetric group to a certain order, were introduced by Feigin and Veselov. These spaces are modules over the ring of symmetric polynomials, and their Hilbert series in elds of characteristic 0 were also computed by Feigin and Veselov. In this paper, we study the Hilbert series of these spaces in elds of positive char- acteristic. Braverman, Etingof, and Finkelberg recently introduced spaces of twisted quasiinvariant polynomials, a generalization of quasiinvariant polynomials in which the space is twisted by a monomial. We extend some of their results to spaces twisted by a product of smooth functions and compute the Hilbert series of the space in certain cases.

We improve upon the local bound in the depth aspect for sup-norms of newforms on D^×, where D is an indefinite quaternion division algebra over Q. Our sup-norm bound implies a depth-aspect subconvexity bound for L(1/2,f×θ_χ), where f is a (varying) newform on D^× of level p^n, and θ_χ is an (essentially fixed) automorphic form on GL_2 obtained as the theta lift of a Hecke character χ on a quadratic field. For the proof, we augment the amplification method with a novel filtration argument and a recent counting result proved by the second-named author to reduce to showing strong quantitative decay of matrix coefficients of local newvectors along compact subsets, which we establish via p-adic stationary phase analysis. Furthermore, we prove a general upper bound in the level aspect for sup-norms of automorphic forms belonging to any family whose associated matrix coefficients have such a decay property.