Cheap Talk

Via NYT:

“It’s disturbing because I don’t know what it means about whether they could look at my own e-mail,” said Oliver Hart, an economics professor. “We need to have a discussion and a better understanding of the policy.”

He and other professors said the searches would prompt him to conduct more business through private e-mail accounts outside of Harvard’s reach.

If one activity is being monitored by the Principal, then the Agent switches to another one. The only problem is that Google looks at the other one.

1. Talking about inlaws with your spouse is a minefield of higher-order beliefs that its really just veiled criticism of those traits of your spouse that have yet to assimilate into the relationship.
2. Kids love to play games with grownups in large part because they infer that if the grownup is playing then the game must be super fun.  The problem is that games for kids are usually boring for grownups.  So someone should invent a game where there are effectively two sets of rules.  The simple kids rules and the more subtle rules for grownups.  Think of Pixar movies with inside jokes aimed over the heads of kids and at the adults.
3. We have recently discovered a great exception to the boring-for-grownups rule for games.  Its called Escape:  The Curse of the Temple.  Highly recommended.
4. On Economics Job Market Rumors the only threads worth reading are the ones that have many Likes and also many Dislikes.  Its gotta have both.
5. When you send out emails pitching your students to departments that are hiring, you recycle the text but cut and paste the name of the recipient and the department to customize the email. When you send it to, say LRMU, address it to Harvard pretending it was a cut-and-paste omission.
6. Someone should collect data on coughing in concert halls over time.  I hypothesize that they are clustered rather than uniformly distributed.  (There’s a simple theory behind it.)

Via the New York Times:

The new standard, which was agreed to at a meeting of the International Air Transport Association in October, will allow airlines to ask customers searching for airfares through travel agents or Web sites to first provide their names, frequent flier numbers, contact details and other information before presenting them with prices. A few airlines are expected to test this approach this year, and it could be widely adopted in a few years, according to the trade group. A majority of the group’s 240 members, which include most American airlines though not Southwest, voted for the standard.

Industry officials say the standard, which they call “new distribution capability,” is simply a way for airlines to better tailor their services to the needs of their customers. For instance, an airline might offer a package that includes free checked baggage, an aisle seat and a 10 percent discount to frequent fliers. And customers would be able to compare competing bundles from different airlines. They also say customers will still have the option of shopping anonymously for basic fares if they choose not to provide any information about themselves.

Thank God for Southwest.

Yogurt for Men.

Mutually Assured Destruction did not succeed in bringing the Democrats and the Republicans back to bargaining table to renegotiate the sequester. So, a reporter facetiously suggests locking up everyone in a room till an agreement is reached.

This is not so facetious as it seems – the sequester was meant to create agreement because the spending cuts were a hostage that no-one wanted to lose. Schelling thought about this sort of thing but the obvious reference is Oliver Williamson’s “Using Hostages to Support Exchange”. So, let’s go the whole way and think about who we would have to hold hostage to give good incentives for Congress to renegotiate the sequester. We would have to have one Democrat and one Republican to give both sides a hostage to release.

First off, John Boehner is not a good candidate for the Republican hostage. The real sequester leaves the Republicans divided – the defense hawks hate it but the deficit hawks want it. Similarly, a significant fraction of the Republican House caucus would just love to leave Boehner hostage. They are not going to negotiate a grand bargain to get him out. Extrapolating this logic to the Democrats, it is pretty clear Hillary Clinton would be a great hostage – all the Democrats would want to release her. This intuition further suggests Hillary will be great candidate in 2016, should she want to run. She would unify Democrats behind her and is a centrist so she would be a good candidate in the general election. My intuition is that Biden does not generate the same enthusiasm for hostage release.

So who is a good Republican hostage? Reagan, if he were still around, would be great. Who is today’s Reagan? Let’s face it, Jeb Bush does not inspire – Republicans would leave him hostage to get a good deal to free Hillary. Ditto Chris Christie. Rubio? Ryan? If Rubio were left hostage, the Republican Party would not lose a “thought leader” as we say in b school. They could pretty much survive without him intellectually. McCain is a leader on immigration reform, Rubio’s key issue. Sure, they lose diversity but not leadership. Ryan on the other hand is a leader when it comes to fiscal matters. No-one is the House can take his place and the Senate budget experts may have expert opinions but lack charisma (e.g. Portman).

So, Ryan should be the Republican hostage and he should be locked up with Hillary Clinton until a “grand bargain” is reached.

Stanford researchers conducted this experiment:

One at a time, 30 men and 30 women entered the simulator and strapped on a set of goggles that transported them into a digital cityscape. A woman’s voice then explained their mission: A diabetic child is stranded somewhere in the city, and you must find him and deliver an insulin injection.

With a whoosh of air, the subjects left the ground – either controlling their flight by a series of arm motions, like Superman, or as a passenger in a helicopter. As they scoured the city, wall-mounted speakers gave the impression of wind whistling by; powerful speakers in the floor produced vibrations to simulate riding in a helicopter. The experiment was set so that two minutes into the simulation, no matter what mode of transport, the subject found the sick child.

After removing the virtual reality goggles, each person then sat with an experimenter to answer a few questions about the experience. This questionnaire, however, was a ruse: During the interview, the experimenter would “accidentally” knock over a cup filled with 15 pens. She would wait five seconds to see if the subject would help her pick them up, and then begin collecting the pens, one pen per second, to give the person another opportunity to come to her aid.

The people who had just flown as Superman were quick to lend a hand, beginning to pick up the pens within three seconds. The helicopter group, however, picked up the first pen, on average, after six seconds (one second after the experimenter began picking them up herself).

The superhero group not only pitched in first, they also picked up about 15 percent more pens on average. While everyone who flew like Superman picked up some pens, six participants who rode in the helicopter failed to offer any help at all.

So, video games where you play the superhero help you behave like a superhero. I’m off to play Zelda for the next couple of hours. Then, I’ll go to work and see if I am (even) nicer to everyone than I am normally.

Adam Davidson at NYT reports on the Justice Department’s action against the merger of Anheuser-Busch Inbev with Grupo Modelo of Mexico:

For decades, [the Justice Department] argue, Anheuser-Busch has been employing what game theorists call a “trigger strategy,” something like the beer equivalent of the Mutually Assured Destruction Doctrine. Anheuser-Busch signals to its competitors that if they lower their prices, it will start a vicious retail war. In 1988, Miller and Coors lowered prices on their flagship beers, which led Anheuser-Busch to slash the price of Bud and its other brands in key markets. At the time, August Busch III told Fortune, “We don’t want to start a blood bath, but whatever the competition wants to do, we’ll do.” Miller and Coors promptly abandoned their price cutting.

But:

Budweiser’s trigger strategy has been thwarted, though, by what game theorists call a “rogue player.” When Bud and Coors raise their prices, Grupo Modelo’s Corona does not. (As an imported beer, Corona is also considered to have a higher value.) And so, according to the Justice Department, AB InBev wants to buy Grupo Modelo not because it thinks the company makes great beer, or because it covets Corona’s 7 percent U.S. market share, but because owning Corona would allow AB InBev to raise prices across all of its brands. And if the company could raise prices by, say, 3 percent, it would earn around $1 billion more in profit every year. Imagine the possibilities. The Justice Department already has.

Here is the Justice Department’s complaint. Davidson says they use game theory models to forecast the impact of the merger. But I do not see that in the complaint.  Is there a publicly available document outlining their analysis?

1. The WaxVac
2. How the Pope Is Chosen
3. Check out the Spicoli on this hatchet-wielding homeless false-savior vanquishing savior
4. Hacking my vagina (not actually mine)

Hat Tip: Arasan Aruliah

I just got back from a short trip. I flew United. I used my app to check our flight status. Surely enough, the incoming plane was delayed by thirty minutes. Decided to spend the extra time in Nature wallowing in the beauty she has created –  a dolphin frolicking in the distance in the warm sea – rather than in the Southwest Florida International Airport in Fort Myers suffering in the sterile concrete lump Man has created. After all, I’d already printed off boarding passes and even checked in baggage before arrival.

Arrive at the counter and attempt to actually check in aforementioned bags. No such option was offered on the electronic check-in terminal. Find a wandering United clerk who repeats the procedure and encounters the same problem. She finds a higher-up United clerk who tries a third time. Then, the higher-up tells us that bags can only be checked in up to thirty minutes before the SCHEDULED departure not the ACTUAL departure. Luckily, sense is seen and baggage is checked in after some complaining.

So, United expects you to make decisions as if the flight is leaving on time even though it is common knowledge that it is not. Then, why tell you flight status? If they do not tell you, you are more likely to make the decisions they want you to make. If they give you up to date information, you are certainly going to make decisions based on the information. Yes, you can find out the information via other websites. But then if you are late, can’t check in bags etc., it’s your own problem. If United has told you flight status and you’re late, then it’s their problem too. Surely, there is some footnote somewhere on some website that says you should be on time even if the flight is late but who’s going to read that?

1. Plagiarize this:  unquotations.
2. Portrait of the artist falling from various heights.
3. Highland Park, IL allows Billy Corgan to keep his 49 sq. ft. neon sign.
4. You probably already saw this, but its a hilarious bad lip reading of NFL players on the field.
5. How to make a cocktail, and many other simple howto videos.