Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Reposted by Shengwu Li

Ben Golub @bengolub.bsky.social · Jul 24

I've been working on a new tool, Refine, to make scholars more productive. If you're interested in being among the very first to try the beta, please read on.

Refine leverages the best current AI models to draw your attention to potential errors and clarity issues in research paper drafts.

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Khoa @khoavuumn.bsky.social · Jul 14

Using time series graphs to make causal claims be like

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Natalie Collina @ncollina.bsky.social · Jul 3

Delighted (and honestly a little bit stunned) that our paper “Swap Regret and Correlated Equilibria Beyond Normal-Form Games” was just awarded both the “Best Paper” and “Best Student Paper” at EC! arxiv.org/abs/2502.20229

Swap Regret and Correlated Equilibria Beyond Normal-Form Games

Swap regret is a notion that has proven itself to be central to the study of general-sum normal-form games, with swap-regret minimization leading to convergence to the set of correlated equilibria and...

arxiv.org

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Shengwu Li @shengwuli.bsky.social · Jul 2

This skeet is in celebration of 75 years of Nash equilibrium.

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Shengwu Li @shengwuli.bsky.social · Jul 2

At least, we can make the following interesting statement about zero-sum games but not about general games: “if there are two players, then there is a Nash equilibrium in minimax strategies.”

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Shengwu Li @shengwuli.bsky.social · Jul 2

Yes, and I have difficulty reconciling the (strong) reading of Itai’s statement with the intuition that the class of all zero-sum games includes the class of two-player zero-sum games, and those are special.

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Shengwu Li @shengwuli.bsky.social · Jul 2

Reminder that N player zero-sum games can represent arbitrary (N-1) player games, by the use of a dummy player.

Financial Times @financialtimes.com · Jul 2

The New York mayoral candidate mistakenly believes the economy is a zero-sum game, writes Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute. https://on.ft.com/44IOZe2

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Michael Clemens @mclem.org · Jun 26

With rent control in the news, it’s a good moment to recall the research of @rebeccadiamond.bsky.social and co-authors.

They show that strict rent control in San Francisco reduced the availability of rental housing, eventually *raising* rental costs.
doi.org/10.1257/aer....

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Al Roth @alroth.bsky.social · Jun 26

Evicting NSF from their building in Washington is pretty revealing. But if they auction off its History Wall, I know which tile I’d bid on. Here’s the list to choose from…
marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2025/06/evic...

Evicting Science from D.C.: the NSF building and it's History Wall

marketdesigner.blogspot.com

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Jennifer Ouellette @jenlucpiquant.bsky.social · Jun 26

A New Pyramid-Like Shape Always Lands the Same Side Up. A tetrahedron is the simplest Platonic solid. Mathematicians have now made one that’s stable only on one side, confirming a decades-old conjecture. www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-pyrami...

A New Pyramid-Like Shape Always Lands the Same Side Up | Quanta Magazine

A tetrahedron is the simplest Platonic solid. Mathematicians have now made one that’s stable only on one side, confirming a decades-old conjecture.

www.quantamagazine.org

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Joshua Gans @joshgans.bsky.social · Jun 19

If AI can't kill radiologists' careers, can it really kill anyone's? www.nytimes.com/2025/05/14/t...

Your A.I. Radiologist Will Not Be With You Soon

www.nytimes.com

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Shengwu Li @shengwuli.bsky.social · Jun 17

What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders?

If two people have the same priors, and their posteriors for an event A are common knowledge, then those posteriors are equal.

Encephalophagy 🎃 @encephalophagy.bsky.social · Oct 14

What is common knowledge in your field, but shocks outsiders?

I'll start: Amazon makes more money out of their Cloud services than out of their e-commerce platform.

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Shengwu Li @shengwuli.bsky.social · Jun 13

bsky.app/profile/cfca...

Colin Camerer @cfcamerer.bsky.social · Jun 13

Interesting business error

www.cnn.com/travel/wethe...

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Joshua Goodman @joshua-goodman.com · Jun 11

Re-upping my advice about how to write a good title and abstract for an academic paper, appropriately called:

"How to Write a Title and Abstract"

Feel free to share this thread, which will focus on titles.

#EconSky #AcademicSky

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Shengwu Li @shengwuli.bsky.social · Jun 5

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Shengwu Li @shengwuli.bsky.social · Jun 3

Jason Hartline likes cocktails with lemon juice.

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Shengwu Li @shengwuli.bsky.social · May 28

I have exactly one paper that uses “unique”, and every use is in the mathematical sense.

Probably I overuse semicolons.

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Joel van der Weele @joelvdweele.bsky.social · May 20

New working paper alert: we provide a model of post-hoc rationalizations, driven by motives of (self-)esteem. We show how this can lead to groupthink, polarization, and a preference for echo chambers.

www.ifo.de/sites/defaul...

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Shengwu Li @shengwuli.bsky.social · May 20

Look, if the WSJ could cluster their standard errors then all would be right in the world.

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Shengwu Li @shengwuli.bsky.social · May 20

While we’re at it, can we have a ruling that the press can’t take a correlational study and assert causation by innuendo?

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Shengwu Li @shengwuli.bsky.social · May 20

For what it’s worth, as a reader I’d really appreciate knowing how much was disclosed to the editorial team.

And it would give authors incentives to push for more transparency where feasible.

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Shengwu Li @shengwuli.bsky.social · May 19

Thank you for shedding light on this!

Is there any way to know, by reading the published paper, whether the identity of the data source was available to the editors?

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AEA Data Editor @aeadata.bsky.social · May 19

Our policy is already too long to cover all possible scenarios, I am told (repeatedly...), but it is very clear "access to the data and code is nonexclusive to the authors" in line 1 ... www.aeaweb.org/journals/dat... Need an exception? See line 3, and a discussion w/ editor + me ensues.

Data and Code Availability Policy

www.aeaweb.org

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Shengwu Li @shengwuli.bsky.social · May 19

Thank you for doing this! (Is this policy public? It would be great if it were common knowledge.)

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Shengwu Li @shengwuli.bsky.social · May 18

A sensible implementation would involve the editor contacting the company directly.

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