Ok guys, welcome to my second blog. This one will be brief, I promise.

This week I learned about statistical mechanics. The homework was about finding the ratio of pressures when the heat is added to the system. I am still struggling to understand how such models evolved into the modern financial continuous time models, other than the Brownian Motions.

I also was able to prove some theorems regarding (simple) Stochastic Integrals, Multidimensional Ito’s Lemma (Integration by parts), and I am currently stuck with the Representation of Positive Local martingales.

By the way, I had an interesting anecdote this week, which relates a lot to Economics. So, I asked two different friends for their solutions to their problem sets of the classes I am taking, as they had already taken this course. I just wanted to compare results, and why not? I thought that could save me some time. I am not sure what their motivation was, but even though I “reminded” them twice, they were unwilling to share. It struck me as surprising because, as an economist, I like to think about the incentives and motivations for people’s decisions. It’s not that I want to judge them, but I am trying to understand, especially because I would have never not-shared my solutions, and even more so at a graduate level, where one pretty much does and learns whatever you want and truly care about.

I still need to find if there is some rationale other than some sort of egoism behind such motivation. At any rate, I guess I will struggle with it on my own. It just makes me wonder how much Science has gotten stuck because of jealous people who don’t want others to understand or know what they know, on short-term goals, as could be profit or mere selfishness. Do you have any comment on that? Please share on the comment section below.

I still have a lot to think about the values and how it shapes economics. I guess this example I have cited reinforces my idea, although I don’t claim by any means that this is scientific proof or evidence for my vague thought.

Thanks for reading again! “See” you later.