Airlines that offer this either send travellers an email inviting them to upgrade or travellers can go direct to the airline’s website.Once you’re on their site, rather than them saying, ‘you can pay £400 to upgrade’, you can now say, ‘I’ll pay £300’,” explains Ken Harris chief executive of Plusgrade, the technology company behind the platform. “There may be a minimum upgrade price and there will be an indicator which shows the strength of your offer.” The airline will then email you at least 72 hours before your flight to tell you if your bid has been successful; if not, you retain your original reservation.

Taking things to another comfort level:

Along with upgrades, you can also pay a nominal fee to ensure the seat next to you is not occupied.

To extract surplus and reduce information rents from high types, “low” types must be punished with inefficient allocations. Expect to be seated en masse if you do not purchase an upgrade even if the plane is half empty.

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.

“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.”

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?

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)

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!

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?

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.

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.