I was directed to a paper by Mark McCabe and Chris Snyder (here is what used to be the link). It was a paper published in the BE Press journal Economic Analysis and Policy and it was a model of academic journal prices. To my surprise, I couldn’t access it. It was subscriber only. The reason: BE Press’s journals had been acquired by de Gruyter and obviously they had changed the policy.

Indeed I checked, and I cannot access my own article unless I am prepared to pony up $45.  The moral of the story is if you think you are publishing in an Open Access journal but your article is not licensed to the public, the publisher has no commitment not to eventually sell it to somebody else who will not honor the original deal.  I think the editor of that journal should resign.

Note well:  Theoretical Economics is a true Open Access journal.  Published articles are publicly licensed under Creative Commons and nobody has the right to close access ever, nor can they acquire that right.  It also happens to be the top field journal in economic theory.

[T]he rapper quickly accepted when a follower named MyBestAssets made him an offer regarding his hometown Giants and the New England Patriots.

It’s unclear who MyBestAssets is, what those assets are, and what the extent of her relationship with Chelsea Handler’s ex is. But she’s apparently a Pats fan.

“Lets bet. If the Giants lose the Superbowl, u must post ur d*ck on the twitter. If they win, I’ll post my boobs & face. Bet?” she wrote. 50 quickly went all in on that.

“Ok It’s a bet. See your d*ck on twitter Feb 5. Lol” she wrote.

LOL indeed. This is definitely the most unusual wager we’ve heard of, which is saying something, as certain THG staff members have bet on the coin toss. The coin toss.

Anyway, let’s go Giants. We really don’t need to see that.

I’m a Pats supporter but I now I have some reason to be happy if the Giants win.

“In our study, roundworms that developed resistance to a virus were able to pass along that immunity to their progeny for many consecutive generations,” reported lead author Oded Rechavi, PhD, associate research scientist in biochemistry and molecular biophysics at CUMC. “The immunity was transferred in the form of small viral-silencing agents called viRNAs, working independently of the organism’s genome.”

An interesting theoretical explanation:

According to the CUMC researchers, Lamarckian inheritance may provide adaptive advantages to an animal. “Sometimes, it is beneficial for an organism to not have a gene expressed,” explained Dr. Hobert. “The classic, Darwinian way this occurs is through a mutation, so that the gene is silenced either in every cell or in specific cell types in subsequent generations. While this is obviously happening a lot, one can envision scenarios in which it may be more advantageous for an organism to hold onto that gene and pass on the ability to silence the gene only when challenged with a specific threat. Our study demonstrates that this can be done in a completely new way: through the transmission of extrachromosomal information. The beauty of this approach is that it’s reversible.”

Beanie bow:  Courtney Conklin Knapp

Maureen Dowd provides the reminder.  Impressive that Newt does not lose his temper or cease to take Ali G seriously.

The way it works now is you write a paper then you send it to a journal and they review it and decide whether to publish it.  The basic unit is the paper.  What if we made the author the basic unit?  Instead of inviting submissions, Econometrica invites applications for the position of author.  Some number of authors are accepted and they can write whatever they want and have it published in Econometrica. The term would be temporary, maybe 1 year.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to just write the paper you want to write, not the paper that the referees want you to write?  The quality of papers would unambiguously increase.  After all, your acceptance is a done deal, anything you write will be published, why bother writing anything less than the most interesting idea that is currently on your mind.

Quality control is achieved by rotating in the authors currently writing the most interesting stuff. Once the current slate of authors is chosen, there is no need anymore for referees or editors.   But if you want peer review, you can have that too.  Anyone wishing to prepare a referee report is invited to do so, they can even do it anonymously if they want and even make it open to the public.  The journal might even want to append the reports onto the published paper.

Come to think of it, these journals already exist:  blogs.  Cheap Talk invites you to apply to be an author guest blogger.  (Past and current holders of this position include Roger Myerson, Lones Smith and Jeroen Swinkels.)

BBdM gets surprisingly soft treatment.

If the direct effect of an anti-defamation law is to reduce the number of false statements made, an indirect effect is to enhance the credibility of all of the false statements that continue to be made.  Because a member of the public who cannot assess the veracity of a given statement will begin with the presumption that the statement is more likely to be true since a larger fraction of all statements made are true.  This of course encourages more false statements, undermining the original direct effect of the law.

Indeed it is impossible to eliminate false damaging statements without making them even more damaging.

Nevertheless, in equilibrium the net effect of an anti-defamation law is to increase the truthfulness of public discourse.  The marginal slanderous statement is the one which is just damaging enough to compensate for the expected cost of a lawsuit.  When that cost is higher, the previously marginal statement is crowded out.

But that just says that the proportion of statements that are false goes down.  Another effect anti-defmation laws are to reduce the number of truthful statements.  Even a truthful statement has a chance of being judged false and damaging.  There will overall be fewer things said.

Furthermore, since a defamatory statement must be proven to be false and some falsehoods are easier to demonstrate than others, the incidence of anti-defamation laws on various types of lies must be considered.   A libelous claim will be made if and only if the cost of the potential lawsuit is outweighed by the value of making it.  For statements whose explicit intention is to defame, that value increases as the overall credibility of public discourse increases.  Among those statements, the ones that are hardest to prove false will actually be said more and more often.

In fact as long as the speaker is creative enough to think of a variety of different ways to defame, the main effect of anti-defamation laws will be to substitute away from verifiable lies in favor of statements which are more difficult to prove false.  This will be so as long as a sufficiently large segment of the public cannot tell the difference between statements that can be verified and statements that cannot.

We believe that $600 billion in stimulus over two years would create 2.5 million jobs relative to what would happen in the absence of stimulus. However, this falls well short of filling the job shortfall and would leave the unemployment rate at 8 percent two years from now. This has convinced the economic team that a considerably larger package is justified.

From a conventional point of view its hard to understand how we could doubt our own motivations. At the moment of decision we can articulate at a conscious level what the right objective is. (If not, then on what basis would we have to be suspicious of ourselves?) And we should evaluate all the possible consequences of the action that tempts us in light of that objective and make the best choice.

So self-doubt is a smoking gun showing that this conventional framework omits an important friction. Here’s my theory what that friction is.

Information comes in millions of tiny pieces over time. It is beyond our memory and our conscious capacity to recall and assemble all of those data when called upon to make a decision that relies on it. Instead we discard the details and just store summary statistics. When it comes time to make a decision, the memory division of our decision-making apparatus steps up and presents the relevant summary statistics.

The instinctive feeling that “I should do X” is what it feels like when the reported summary statistics point in favor of X. It has an instinctive quality because it is entirely pre-conscious. Conscious deliberation begins only after that initial inclination is formed.

At that stage your task is to verify whether the proposed course of action is consistent with your current motivation and the specific details of the situation you find yourself in. But that decision is necessarily made with limited information because you only have the summary statistics to go on.

Any divergence between your present frame of mind and the frame of mind that you were in when you recorded and stored those summary statistics can give you cause for doubting your instincts.

That suggests an interesting behavioral framework. The decision maker is composed of two agents, an Advisor and a Decider. The Advisor has all of the information about the payoffs to different actions and he makes recommendations to the Decider who then takes an action. The friction is that the Advisor and Decider’s preferences are different and the difference fluctuates over time. Thus, at any point in time the Decider must resolve a conflict between his own objective and the unknown objective of the Advisor.