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One of my favorite vineyards. Ridge wine is undervalued because their vineyards are largely in the Santa Cruz Mountains not in ever-trendy Napa. Watch Paul Draper their iconic wine maker with Julia Child:
Cable T.V. is boring, the sky is dark and it’s snowing. What can you do to entertain yourself? One answer:
When Nancy Bonnell, 31, thinks of her baby girl due next month, she recalls the December snow that she and her husband, Brian, endured: “We lived in the apartment and had nothing to do.”So they cooked in their Derwood home, they grew restless and then they — well, you know.
The couple had been trying to have a baby and originally thought it might happen during a post-Christmas vacation to the Cook Islands in the South Pacific. They could nickname her “Cookie Girl,” they thought.
Then Bonnell learned during the second week of January that she was expecting. She deduced that she had conceived sometime during the snowstorm. Time for a new nickname.
“It was more like ‘Snow Angel,’ ” she said.
But:
Yet that theory was quashed in a 1970 paper by Richard Udry, a demographer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He found no statistically significant upswing in births associated with the blackout. “It is evidently pleasing to many people,” he concluded, “to fantasize that when people are trapped by some immobilizing event which deprives them of their usual activities, most will turn to copulation.”
Someone should go back and look at the data and see if it was analyzed correctly. Surely a Q.J.E. if you can show convincingly that snow leads to nookie.
How to allocate an indivisible object to one of three children, it’s a parent’s daily mechanism design problem. Today I used the first-response mechanism. “Who wants X?” And whoever says “me!” first gets it.
This dimension of screening, response time, is absent from most theoretical treatments. While in principle it can be modeled, it won’t arise in conventional models because “rational” agents take no time to decide what they want.
But the idea behind using it in practice is that the quicker you can commit yourself the more likely it is you value it a lot. Of course it doesn’t work with “who wants ice cream?” But it does make sense when its “We’ve got 3 popsicles, who wants the blue one?” We are aiming at efficiency here since fairness is either moot (because any allocation is going to leave two out in the cold) or a part of a long-run scheme whereby each child wins with equal frequency asymptotically.
It’s not without its problems.
- Free disposal is hard to prevent. Eventually the precocious child figures out to shout first and think later, reneging if she realizes she doesn’t want it.
- There’s also ex-post negotiation. You might think that this can only lead to Pareto improvements but not so fast. Child #1 can “strongly encourage” child #2 to hand over the goodies. A trade of goods for “security” is not necessarily Pareto improving when the incentives are fully accounted for.
- It prevents efficient combinatorial allocation when there are externalities and/or complementarities. Such as, “who’s going in Mommy’s car?” A too-quick “me!” invites a version of the exposure problem if child #3 follows suit.
Still, it has its place in a parent’s repertoire of mechanisms.
Cheap Talk 