Piles of Cubes, Monotone Path Polytopes and Hyperplane Arrangements

Monotone path polytopes arise as a special case of the construction of fiber polytopes, introduced by Billera and Sturmfels. A simple example is provided by the permutahedron, which is a monotone path polytope of the standard unit cube. The permutahedron is the zonotope polar to the braid arrangement. We show how the zonotopes polar to the cones of certain deformations of the braid arrangement can be realized as monotone path polytopes. The construction is an extension of that of the permutahedron and yields interesting connections between enumerative combinatorics of hyperplane arrangements and geometry of monotone path polytopes

Binomial Eulerian polynomials for colored permutations

Binomial Eulerian polynomials first appeared in work of Postnikov, Reiner and Williams on the face enumeration of generalized permutohedra. They are $\gamma$-positive (in particular, palindromic and unimodal) polynomials which can be interpreted as $h$-polynomials of certain flag simplicial polytopes and which admit interesting Schur $\gamma$-positive symmetric function generalizations. This paper introduces analogues of these polynomials for $r$-colored permutations with similar properties and uncovers some new instances of equivariant $\gamma$-positivity in geometric combinatorics.Comment: Final version; minor change

Some applications of Rees products of posets to equivariant gamma-positivity

The Rees product of partially ordered sets was introduced by Bj\"orner and Welker. Using the theory of lexicographic shellability, Linusson, Shareshian and Wachs proved formulas, of significance in the theory of gamma-positivity, for the dimension of the homology of the Rees product of a graded poset $P$ with a certain $t$-analogue of the chain of the same length as $P$. Equivariant generalizations of these formulas are proven in this paper, when a group of automorphisms acts on $P$, and are applied to establish the Schur gamma-positivity of certain symmetric functions arising in algebraic and geometric combinatorics.Comment: Final version, with a section on type B Coxeter complexes added; to appear in Algebraic Combinatoric

A survey of subdivisions and local hh-vectors

The enumerative theory of simplicial subdivisions (triangulations) of simplicial complexes was developed by Stanley in order to understand the effect of such subdivisions on the $h$-vector of a simplicial complex. A key role there is played by the concept of a local $h$-vector. This paper surveys some of the highlights of this theory and some recent developments, concerning subdivisions of flag homology spheres and their $\gamma$-vectors. Several interesting examples and open problems are discussed.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures; minor changes and update

The local hh-vector of the cluster subdivision of a simplex

The cluster complex $\Delta (\Phi)$ is an abstract simplicial complex, introduced by Fomin and Zelevinsky for a finite root system $\Phi$. The positive part of $\Delta (\Phi)$ naturally defines a simplicial subdivision of the simplex on the vertex set of simple roots of $\Phi$. The local $h$-vector of this subdivision, in the sense of Stanley, is computed and the corresponding $\gamma$-vector is shown to be nonnegative. Combinatorial interpretations to the entries of the local $h$-vector and the corresponding $\gamma$-vector are provided for the classical root systems, in terms of noncrossing partitions of types $A$ and $B$. An analogous result is given for the barycentric subdivision of a simplex.Comment: 21 pages, 4 figure

The Value of Knowing Your Enemy

Many auction settings implicitly or explicitly require that bidders are treated equally ex-ante. This may be because discrimination is philosophically or legally impermissible, or because it is practically difficult to implement or impossible to enforce. We study so-called {\em anonymous} auctions to understand the revenue tradeoffs and to develop simple anonymous auctions that are approximately optimal. We consider digital goods settings and show that the optimal anonymous, dominant strategy incentive compatible auction has an intuitive structure --- imagine that bidders are randomly permuted before the auction, then infer a posterior belief about bidder i's valuation from the values of other bidders and set a posted price that maximizes revenue given this posterior. We prove that no anonymous mechanism can guarantee an approximation better than O(n) to the optimal revenue in the worst case (or O(log n) for regular distributions) and that even posted price mechanisms match those guarantees. Understanding that the real power of anonymous mechanisms comes when the auctioneer can infer the bidder identities accurately, we show a tight O(k) approximation guarantee when each bidder can be confused with at most k "higher types". Moreover, we introduce a simple mechanism based on n target prices that is asymptotically optimal and build on this mechanism to extend our results to m-unit auctions and sponsored search

A Simple Bijection for the Regions of the Shi Arrangement of Hyperplanes

The Shi arrangement ${\mathcal S}_n$ is the arrangement of affine hyperplanes in ${\mathbb R}^n$ of the form $x_i - x_j = 0$ or $1$, for $1 \leq i < j \leq n$. It dissects ${\mathbb R}^n$ into $(n+1)^{n-1}$ regions, as was first proved by Shi. We give a simple bijective proof of this result. Our bijection generalizes easily to any subarrangement of ${\mathcal S}_n$ containing the hyperplanes $x_i - x_j = 0$ and to the extended Shi arrangements