Shengwu Li

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.

1/

Using time series graphs to make causal claims be like

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...

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

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

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.”

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.

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

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....

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

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...

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.

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...

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

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

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.

bsky.app/profile/cfca...

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

Jason Hartline likes cocktails with lemon juice.

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

Probably I overuse semicolons.

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...

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

I have one suggestion for reform:

bsky.app/profile/shen...

And this is good for honest authors with anonymous data! It helps differentiate them from fraudsters.

Letting the journal know the firm’s identity strikes a balance between the firm’s privacy concerns and the journal’s interest in preventing fraud.

Maybe journals should have a policy that data from anonymous sources will be verified by the journal before publication.

The editor could contact the firm, to verify that it exists and that the study was conducted as stated.

@aeadata.bsky.social is this feasible or am I missing something?

I say this with the bias of hindsight.