I Am Not Related To Richard T. Ely

May 9, 2013 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | 3 comments

As far as I know.  Anyway I always assumed that the Ely Lecture at the AEA meetings was named after me.

But changing the subject, Adriana Lleras-Muney writes to me:

From Henry Miller

“To be intelligent may be a boon, but to be completely trusting, gullible to the point of idiocy, to surrender without reservation is of of the supreme joys of life”

Agree?

I think Henry Miller is confusing correlation with causation.  Its probably true that in our happiest moments (among those moments we are with other people–I might even dispute that those moments are the happiest unconditionally) we are trusting, gullible and idiotically surrendering.  But that’s likely because we are with a certain person and in a certain blissful state that we respond by surrendering.  Its the person and the state that brings us the supreme joy and our surrender is just a symptom of that joy.  I might go far as to say that the surrender is a complementary good but its enough to think about surrendering to the very next person who knocks on your office door to convince you that the surrender is not itself the source of joy.

Consider The Equilibrium: Bulls Vs. Heat

May 7, 2013 in art of office politics, economics | by | 4 comments

Via ESPN:

“Thibs is a guru,” Gibson said. “He understands the game plan.
“He had me guarding Ray Allen. That’s how much confidence he has in everybody’s ability to guard on defense. He really drew up and knew what the team was gonna do.
Every time they ran down and ran offense, it was exactly what Thibs showed us on paper.”

Blogging Something I Know Nothing About

May 6, 2013 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | 7 comments

Would it be possible to make a statistical model of a jazz solo and use it to create new ones?  Take a standard, and let’s focus on the saxaphone, say.  Go to the solo and estimate a Markov transition kernel which tells you the probability distribution over the next tone conditional on the previous tone.  In particular you want the joint probability distribution over the following note (or just the interval) and the note’s value (eighth, quarter, etc.)  Feed it tons and tons of recordings of sax solos for the same tune (that’s why you want a standard.)

Once you have estimated your kernel, simulate it.  Will it be music?  How much of an improvement do you get if the state variable is the last two notes instead of just one?  If your state variable is the last n notes, at what n are improvements no longer noticeable?

Consider The Equilibrium

May 5, 2013 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 1 comment

In my kids’ tennis class they are getting good enough to have actual rallies.  The coach feeds them a ball and has them play out points.  Each rally is worth 1 point and they play to 10.  To stop them from trying to hit winners on the first shot and in attempt to get them to play longer rallies, the coaches tried out an interesting rule.  ”The ball must cross the net four times before the point begins.  If your shot goes out before that, its 2 points for the other side.”

Memory And Mental Accounting

April 30, 2013 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 4 comments

One form of mental accounting is where you give yourself separate budgets for things like food, entertainment, gas, etc.  It’s suboptimal because these separate budgets make you less flexible in your consumption plans.  For example in a month where there are many attractive entertainment offerings, you are unable to reallocate spending away from other goods in favor of entertainment.

But it could be understood as a second-best solution when you have memory limitations.  Suppose that when you decide how much to spend on groceries, you often forget or even fail to think of how much you have been spending on gas this month.  If so, then its not really possible to be as flexible as you would be in the first-best because there’s no way to reduce your grocery expenditures in tandem with the increased spending on gas.

That means that you should not increase your spending on gas.  In other words you should stick to a fixed gas budget.

Now memory is associative, i.e. current experiences stimulate memories of related experiences.  This can give some structure to the theory.  It makes sense to have a budget for entertainment overall rather than separate budgets for movies and concerts because when you are thinking of one you are likely to recall your spending on the other.  So the boundaries of budget categories should be determined by an optimal grouping of expenditures based on how closely associated they are in memory.

(Discussion with Asher Wolinsky and Simone Galperti)

Efficient Markets Hypothesis Disproved: Arbitrage Opportunity In Frozen Indian Food

April 30, 2013 in economics, teaching | by | 2 comments

I enjoy my Mother’s cooking all too rarely. This is good for my waist line but bad for my taste buds. I have resorted to consumption of frozen Indian food as a poor substitute. I was surprised to find that Whole Foods carries a reasonable brand, Tandoor Chef, that has some decent options. Of course, these products come with a Whole Foods price tag.

On a recent trip to Devon Av., I happened to notice that the Fresh Farms supermarket carried these same products. Unfortunately, the prices are benchmarked against Whole Foods – no good deal there. But the supermarket also carries much cheaper products by Healthy Tiffin and they bear a remarkable resemblance to the Tandoor Chef products, e.g. both have Paneer Tikka Masala cooked in a relatively healthy way (if that is possible!). On closer inspection, Healthy Tiffin and Tandoor Chef are both made by Deep Products. I have been enjoying the arbitrage opportunity for a few months now. I worry that Deep Foods will reduce the quality of the Healthy Tiffin products to prevent arbitrage!

imageslogo-healthy

Dividing Blame And Conquering Guilt

April 29, 2013 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | by | 5 comments

The NRA successfully lobbied to stop gun control legislation.  Several Democrats sided with Republicans to defeat it.  But the NRA seems to have spent more than necessary to defeat the measures because they failed by more than a one-vote margin.  It would have been enough to buy exactly the number of Senators necessary to prevent the bill from progressing through the Senate, no more than that.

But in fact the cost of defeating legislation is decreasing in the number of excess votes purchased.  If the NRA has already secured enough votes to win, the next vote cannot be pivotal and so the Senator casting that vote takes less blame for the defeat.  Indeed if enough Senators are bought so that the bill goes down by at least two votes, no Senator is pivotal.

Here’s a simple model.  Suppose that the political cost of failing to pass gun control is c.  If the NRA buys the minimum number of votes needed to halt the legislation it must pay c to each Senator it buys.  That’s because each of those Senators could refuse to vote for the NRA and avoid the cost c.  But if the NRA buys one extra vote, each Senator incurs the cost c whether or not he goes along with the NRA and his vote has just become cheaper by the amount c.

For the Vapor Mill:  What is the voting rule that maximizes the cost of defeating popular legislation?

Amnesty and Bandwagon Effects

April 28, 2013 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | by | 2 comments

Amnesty –forgiving all of the current and previous violators but renewing a threat to punish future violators– always seems like a reputation fail.  If we are granting amnesty today then doesn’t that signal that we will eventually be granting amnesty again in the future?

But there is at least one environment in which a once-only amnesty is incentive compatible and effective:  when crime has bandwagon effects.  For example, suppose there’s a stash of candy in the pantry and my kids have taken to raiding it.  I catch one red-handed but I can’t punish her because she rightly points out that since everybody’s doing it she assumed we were looking the other way.  A culture of candy crime had taken hold.

An amnesty (bring me your private stash and you will be forgiven) moves us from the everyone’s a criminal because everyone’s a criminal equilibrium to the one in which nobody’s a criminal.  The latter is potentially stable if its easier to single out and punish a lone offender than one of many.

Why There Is No Need For A “Domestic Enemy Combatant” Status

April 24, 2013 in art of office politics | by | 7 comments

I was watching Fox News and they were discussing whether the law needed to be changed so US citizens could be interrogated at length without being told their Miranda rights. The rationale is that the suspect is willing to give information if he knows it will not be used against him in a court. Also, he will be more pliable with no lawyer present. And if the information is very valuable, this is a price worth paying. (At least I think this was the gist of the Five on Fox crowd.  I was a bit inebriated after a boozy conference meal at the Princeton Conference on Political Economy.)

The Five on Fox usually rail against rampant Leviathan – an uncontrolled government usurping the rights of honest, gun toting, red meat eating citizenry. That same Leviathan, if given the power to use domestic enemy combatant status, would apply it more and more broadly. A domestic enemy combatant is actually harder to define objectively than an assault weapon. A slippery slope would undoubtedly ensue and regular citizens would face being interrogated as enemy combatants. This is the risk of adopting the view of the illustrious Five.

But what about the benefits of greater Leviathan power, the power to interrogate true enemy combatants? We know Leviathan breaks the law at the risk of being held to account in court. There is no point running this risk in run of the mill cases. But there is a benefit in true enemy combatant cases. No jury will convict Leviathan in the latter case – the court of public opinion will replace the court of law. But egregious violations in run of the mill cases will surely lead to convictions by triggering the feeling “that could have been me” in jury members. So, roughly speaking, the law will be broken if and only if the case merits it.

Hence, there is no need for “domestic enemy combatant” status w.r.t. Miranda rights.

HT: I believe Becker and/or Posner made a similar argument years ago. If someone can tell me the reference I would be grateful.

Thoughts Left Lying Around

April 23, 2013 in Uncategorized | by | 2 comments

  1. Capitalize on money illusion (and take a step toward eventually dispelling it) by having the Tooth Fairy leave 1000 Korean Won rather than 1 US Dollar.
  2. Security teams employ hackers to find flaws in their software before taking it live.  Marketing teams should hire comedians to find potential bastardizations of new brand names/marketing campaigns under consideration.
  3. I would like to see brain images of pianists while they play.  How does hand independence work in the brain?  Are both sides continuously active or is the brain switching back and forth monitoring the hands separately?
  4. Even though I am the game theorist my wife does all the bargaining because she is better at “acting” irrational.

How To Organize A Talk

April 22, 2013 in Uncategorized | Tags: | by | 5 comments

Say you are speaking for an hour to an audience of 100.  Its just a fact of human nature that nobody in the audience is going to be paying close attention to what you are saying for more than 1/4 of the time.  The other 45 minutes of the time people will be thinking, talking, or just daydreaming. You must accept this as an unavoidable constraint.

Absent any intervention on your part then you will get a randomly selected 15 minutes of attention from each member of the audience.  This means that at any one point in time you will have the attention of only 1/4 of your audience or 25 out of the 100 people.  The very important things you will have to say will be processed and potentially remembered by 1/4 of your audience, the same fraction that will be paying attention to the least important things you have to say.

So what you should do to prepare is ask yourself what are the three important things you have to say and you want remembered.  Each of them should take you five minutes to say.  Then imagine you have a sign that will flash above you which tells everyone in the audience whether now is the time to be paying close attention or now is an opportunity to doze off.  With that sign you could coordinate their attention so that all of them are listening during the same 15 minutes, those 15 minutes when you will be saying your three important things.

Now you probably won’t be bringing that sign with you.  But you can achieve the same effect by using the way that you stand, the way that you talk, and the style of your slides.  When you are saying something important you speak slowly and loudly and you walk up and down the room and make eye contact and your slides have just one or two things on them so that they are easy to read and process.

You are telling them with your demeanor that now is the time to listen.  Later, when you are saying something less important you lower your voice, go faster, stand still and read off your busy slides. You are doing these things to tell your audience that now is the time to think, talk or doodle and rest up for the next important moment.

Hopefully Somewhere Inside The Book They Teach You Why This Notice On The Cover Is Wrong

April 22, 2013 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 6 comments

"On Committees" by Itty and Bitty

 

How much did I add to the cost of the student edition when I disposed of it into a randomly chosen grad student’s mailbox?  Should I have recycled it instead?  (Textbook authors’ names hidden to protect their reputations.)

Coonskin coil:  Scott Ogawa.

How To Browse RSS Feeds

April 21, 2013 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 1 comment

The Universe holding you by the fist and shaking

If you are like me you subscribe to many RSS feeds and you find them accumulating articles faster than you can read them.  What do you do when MetaFilter has 500 unread articles?

Use the glance and scroll method.  Look at an article and read it if it looks interesting.  But if it doesnt then don’t keep browsing.  Give a hard flick on your mousewheel, trackpad, phone screen whatever and scroll rapidly past a large number of articles and glance at the next one you land on.  Repeat.

The point is that all articles, regardless of their position in the feed are equally likely to be interesting, other things equal.  So if you can only read a fraction of what’s there you can’t do any worse than this.  But in fact other things are not equal.

The quality of articles is endogenously serially correlated.  Because any blog runs the best material available that day/couple of days/week.  If you landed on a lame article then chances are you landed on a lame day.  Scroll your way out of that trough and hope you land on a peak.

I Move That The AEA Stop Publishing Papers and Proceedings

April 16, 2013 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 21 comments

Non-peer reviewed, inaccessible data, and punditry that can’t tell the difference between P&P and a regular AER article can’t be good for the reputation of the journal, the AEA, or the profession.

Sordid Links

April 12, 2013 in Uncategorized | by | Leave a comment

  1. Celebrity wines.
  2. The guy who said “Mind The Gap” died and then they changed the voice in all but one station and his former lover would make a pilgrimage to that station just to hear his voice.
  3. Lightning traveling through wood.
  4. How a differential gear works and why trains don’t need them.

T-Mobile Pricing

April 11, 2013 in Uncategorized | by | 5 comments

Screen-Shot-2013-03-26-at-11.07.54-AM-540x299

 

Credit cards carry hidden fees, cell phone plans have two year contracts, hotels rip you off if you get a Kit Kat from the minibar etc etc.

It is possible to explain these features in  the “rational firm, dumb consumer” paradigm if there is one rational firm, i.e. a monopolist. Things get trickier if there is competition. If one firm is offering a deliberately confusing pricing scheme to extract surplus from boundedly rational consumers, why doesn’t another offer something transparent and steal customers? Then the usual logic of Bertrand competition should eliminate intransparent pricing and lead to a zero profit equilibrium. There are two theories (I know of) for why this might not happen.

The first is the adverse selection story of Ausubel. If one credit card company cuts prices, instead of attracting confused, profitable consumers, it attracts unprofitable, risky customers who might default. The deviation is not worthwhile and this undercuts the usual Bertrand logic.

The second is the add-on story of Ellison and Gabaix and Laibson. Let’s say hotels are pricing hotel rooms below cost and making profits on the add-ons (minibars, pay per view, phones etc.). One hotel deviates and prices the room just above costs and gets rid of the rip off pricing on the add-ons. Confused consumers learn they have been confused and go to the hotel which prices rooms below cost and remember to take their cell phone and laptop (to watch streaming movies) and pack a few energy bars. The hotel that prices just above costs does not get new customers and the deviation was not worthwhile.

You can’t purchase the subsidized cell phone from ATT without signing on to the rip off two year plan – so the add-on story is hard to apply. There might be some adverse selection towards TMobile because you can pay for the cellphone in installments so you can default. But this effect does not seem large and could go the other way – stay with ATT, get an even more subsidized cell phone and default on the two year plan.

So, does that mean the upstart maverick player TMobile has triggered competition and cheap plans await us?

Plagiarize This

April 10, 2013 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 4 comments

Oliver Sacks on the social costs of plagiarism stigma:

Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism when she was only twelve.2 Though deaf and blind from an early age, and indeed languageless before she met Annie Sullivan at the age of six, she became a prolific writer once she learned finger spelling and Braille. As a girl, she had written, among other things, a story called “The Frost King,” which she gave to a friend as a birthday gift. When the story found its way into print in a magazine, readers soon realized that it bore great similarities to “The Frost Fairies,” a children’s short story by Margaret Canby. Admiration for Keller now turned into accusation, and Helen was accused of plagiarism and deliberate falsehood, even though she said that she had no recollection of reading Canby’s story, and thought she had made it up herself. The young Helen was subjected to a ruthless inquisition, which left its mark on her for the rest of her life.

There is a subtle defense of plagiarism in the connection he draws with false memories, and the value of ignoring the source.

Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.

Kepi kiss:  David Olson.

Colin Camerer, Games, Brains, Monkeys

April 10, 2013 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | by | 1 comment

Ghutrah grip:  Maximo Rossi

Consider The Equilibrium

April 9, 2013 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | by | 11 comments

Spouse A (henceforth “she”, the driver) prefers the air inside the vehicle to be a little warmer than the preferred temperature of Spouse B (“he”, the navigator, not because he is a worse driver –quite the contrary– but because he is an even better passenger.) In their regular confrontation with this dilemma they are seemingly blessed with the optional dual-zone climate control in their decked out Volvo SUV.

And indeed there is an equilibrium of the dual climate-zone game in which each spouse enjoys his/her temperature bliss point. This equilibrium is unfortunately highly unstable. Because of the exchange of heat across the thermal gradient the only way each can maintain the constant target temperature is to adjust their controllers so that the air blown out their respective vents deviates slightly from that target further in the direction of the extreme. Hers must be set somewhat warmer and his somewhat cooler.

Now from that starting point, the slightest perturbation upsets the delicate balance and can set off a dangerous chain reaction. Consider for example what happens when, due to random alterations in air flow she begins to feel a bit on the cool side of her comfort zone. Her response is to adjust her controller one peg toward the red. This restores her comfort level but very soon as a result he will begin to feel the discomfort of unexpectedly hot and dry air blowing into his zone and he will react by moving his controller one peg toward the blue.

This is not likely to end well.

I miss you like this title misses the point

Race and Obama’s Vote Share

April 9, 2013 in Uncategorized | by | 1 comment

Harvard grad student (?), Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, studies Google searches for racial epithets 2004-2007 to control for reverse causation. He used this to define an area’s racism. He finds:

Racially charged search rate is a significant, negative predictor of Obama’s 2008 and
2012 vote shares, controlling for Kerry’s 2004 vote share. The result is robust to controls
for changes in unemployment rates; home-state candidate preference; Census division fixed
effects; demographic controls; and long-term trends in Democratic voting….

The preferred point estimates imply that, relative to the most racially tolerant areas in
the United States, prejudice cost Obama 4.2 percentage points of the national popular vote
in 2008 and 4.0 percentage points in 2012. These numbers imply that, among white voters
who would have supported a white Democratic presidential candidate in 2008 (2012), 9.1
(9.5) percent did not support a black Democratic presidential candidate.

 

Saving The Best For Last

April 8, 2013 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 9 comments

Star Michigan guard Trey Burke collected two personal fouls in the early minutes of the National Championship game against Louisville and he was promptly benched and sat out most of the remaining first half.  The announcers didn’t bother to say why because its common wisdom that you don’t want your best players fouling out early.

But the common wisdom requires some scrutiny because on its surface it actually looks absurd.  You fear your best player fouling out because then his playing time might be limited.  So in response you guarantee his playing time will be limited by benching him.  Jonathon Weinstein once made this point.

But just because basketball commentators, and probably even basketball coaches, don’t properly understand the rationale for the strategy doesn’t mean the strategy is unsound.  In fact it follows from a very basic strategic idea:  information is valuable.

Suppose the other team is scoring points at some random rate.  If they are lucky they score a lot and if they are less lucky they score fewer.  If the other team scores a lot your team should start shooting threes and go for short possessions to catch up.  If the other team scores fewer you should go for safer shots and run down the clock. But you only know which of these you should do at the end of the game.  If your best players are on the bench at that time you cannot capitalize on this information.

One Of The Best Chinese Restaurants I Have Ever Been To Is In A Charlottesville, VA Strip Mall

April 8, 2013 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | by | 5 comments

And I have been to many very good Chinese restaurants in China, Taiwan, Singapore etc.  This place is called Peter Chang’s China Grill.  Here’s Wikipedia about the chef.  Here are the badly misguided Yelp reviews.  Note that from the look of the restaurant, the location, the service you would never guess what was in store for you.  Indeed I was terrified when the folks at UVA told me we were driving off campus to go have Chinese for lunch, even moreso when I saw the place they were taking me to.  But the food was a revelation.  You probably do need to know what and how to order.  For that I suggest getting invited to give a talk at the University of Virginia Economics department.

Thoughts Left Lying Around

April 7, 2013 in Uncategorized | by | 9 comments


 

  1. Econ grad schools should add as a requirement for the PhD that students take a recent published experiment and attempt to replicate it.
  2. Not accepting American Express is a local public good.  Because once enough of them do it, I stop expecting that it will be accepted and stop offering it on the first try.
  3. Homosexuality is a puzzle for evolution not because of the question “how does it survive despite not reproducing?” Because for a gene reproduction *is* survival.  The puzzle is “how do they reproduce despite not wanting to?”
  4. Books get made into films all the time, why do poems rarely get made into pop songs?
  5. Why is it easier to apologize when the offended party isn’t actually upset?

Drawing:  Rain from http://www.f1me.net

Sordid Links

April 5, 2013 in Uncategorized | by | Leave a comment

  1. 40 blurbs from negative Ebert reviews.  My favorite so far:  “Mad Dog Time is the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time. Oh, I’ve seen bad movies before. But they usually made me care about how bad they were. Watching Mad Dog Time is like waiting for the bus in a city where you’re not sure they have a bus line….Mad Dog Time should be cut into free ukulele picks for the poor.”
  2. Outtakes from Siskel and Ebert.  Watch the hilarious game of The Dozens that breaks out midway through.
  3. Pilot for Three’s Company.
  4. Just scroll through these pictures and you will figure it out.
  5. Old Harmony Korine appearances on Letterman.

A New Measure of Suspense

April 5, 2013 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 9 comments

In our paper, Alex Frankel, Emir Kamenica and I argue that soccer is among the most suspenseful sports according to our theoretical measure.  Now, via Matt Dickenson, comes an empirical validation of this finding using German cardiac arrest data:

The red line shows the spike in heart attacks on the dates of 2006 World Cup matches involving the German national team.  Note that point 7 is the third place match against Portugal after Germany had been eliminated in their semi-final match against Italy (point 6.)

Male Duck Penises and Arms Races

April 4, 2013 in Uncategorized | by | 2 comments

Congress is wading through NSF funded research to weed out projects they consider unworthy. One study they hit upon studies duck penises. The lead author, Patricia Brennan of UMass- Amherst, describes the act of duck procreation:

Male ducks force copulations on females, and males and females are engaged in a genital arms race with surprising consequences. Male ducks have elaborate corkscrew-shaped penises, the length of which correlates with the degree of forced copulation males impose on female ducks. Females are often unable to escape male coercion, but they have evolved vaginal morphology that makes it difficult for males to inseminate females close to the sites of fertilization and sperm storage. Males have counterclockwise spiraling penises, while females have clockwise spiraling vaginas and blind pockets that prevent full eversion of the male penis.

Evolutionary arms races between predator and prey are not unusual. Arms races between males are not unusual – peacock tail effects. But an arms race between males and females of the same species does seem unusual. Males seek to inseminate as many females as possible and have evolved elaborate penises. Females want to choose their mates so they have evolved an elaborate defense mechanism. The mechanism minimizes the chance of egg fertilization if sex is forced. But if the female is a willing partner, insemination is easier.

This research seems quite interesting. It is basic science. No pharmaceutical company is going to fund it. Seems better than funding weapons that the Pentagon does not want.

 

 

The Demise of Sponsored Search Ads?

April 4, 2013 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 6 comments

Steve Tadelis, Distinguished Economist at eBay and his colleagues have done an experiment and seem to have concluded that its a waste of money to pay for sponsored links on Google when Google’s regular search algorithm shows links to eBay for free.

Before you read the rest of this post, go to Google and try searching for “Amazon.” You’ll probably notice that the top two listings are both for Amazon’s website, with the first appearing on a light beige background. If you click on the first — a paid search ad — Amazon will pay Google for attracting your business. If you click on the second, Amazon gets your business but Google gets nothing. Try “Macys,” “Walgreens,” and “Sports Authority” — you’ll see the same thing.

If you search for eBay, though, you’ll find only a single listing — an unpaid one. Odds are, after marketers at Amazon, Walgreens and elsewhere catch wind of a preliminary study released on Friday, their search listings will start to look a lot more like eBay’s. The study — by eBay Research Labs economists Thomas Blake, Chris Nosko, and Steve Tadelis — analyzed eBay sales after shutting down purchases of search ads on Google and elsewhere, while maintaining a control set of regions where search ads continued unchanged. Their findings suggest that many paid ads generate virtually no increase in sales, and even for ones that do, the sales benefits are far eclipsed by the cost of the ads themselves.

This is a dilemma for Google.  Because it suggests that the way to capitalize on the popularity of their search algorithm is to discriminate against those who don’t pay for ads.  But unless Google reinvents itself as a full-blown paid advertising site, such discrimination is likely to raise legal issues.

Pleased To Be Sharing The Marquee With Dennis Rodman

April 3, 2013 in Uncategorized | Tags: , , | by | Leave a comment

Here I am on the podcast Hang Up And Listen with hosts Stefan Fatsis, Mike Pesca and Josh Levin.  Its a sports oriented podcast and I am talking about Purple Pricing. They had some very good questions.  I come in at about the 25 minute mark.

Great Prelim Question: Wife Carrying

April 2, 2013 in Uncategorized | Tags: , | by | 9 comments

NEWRY, Maine — A Finnish couple has added to their victories by taking first place in the North American Wife Carrying Championship at Maine’s Sunday River ski resort.

Taisto Miettinen and Kristina Haapanen traveled from Helsinki, Finland – where they won the World Wife Carrying Championship – for Saturday’s contest. The Sun Journal (bit.ly/Q30QWq) reports that the couple finished with a time of 52.58 seconds on a course that includes hurdles, sand traps and a water hole.

The winners receive the woman’s weight in beer and five times her weight in cash.

The model:  At date 0 each of N husbands decides how fat his wife should be.  At date 1 they run a wife-carrying race, where the husband’s speed is given by some function f(s,w) where s is the strength of the husband, and w is the weight of his wife.  The function f is increasing in its first argument and decreasing in the second. The winner gets K times his wife’s weight in cash and beer.  Questions

  1. If the husbands are symmetric what is the equilibrium distribution of wife weights?
  2. Under what conditions on f does a stronger husband have a fatter wife?
  3. Derive the comparative statics with respect to K.

Sax in New York

April 2, 2013 in vapor mill | by | Leave a comment

Still not the complete account of the batlle – middle segment is missing

(HT: Chris Blattman’s twitter feed.)

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