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A famous speech from Noah S. “Soggy” Sweat, delivered on the floor of the Mississippi State Legislature, on the possible end to alcohol prohibition in that state.
My friends, I had not intended to discuss this controversial subject at this particular time. However, I want you to know that I do not shun controversy. On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue at any time, regardless of how fraught with controversy it might be. You have asked me how I feel about whiskey. All right, here is how I feel about whiskey:
If when you say whiskey you mean the devil’s brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous, gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair, and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am against it.
But, if when you say whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips, and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman’s step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and to forget, if only for a little while, life’s great tragedies, and heartaches, and sorrows; if you mean that drink, the sale of which pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used to provide tender care for our little crippled children, our blind, our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm; to build highways and hospitals and schools, then certainly I am for it.
This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.
Vueltiao vibe: Adriana Lleras-Muney. Here is Wikipedia.
Start with a world without rhetorical questions. All questions are interpreted as being genuinely inquisitive. You are considering doing X and someone comes up to you and says “Why on Earth would you want to do X?”
Now two things happen. First, since all questions are genuinely inquisitive, you take his question literally and you start thinking of an answer. Why indeed do you want to do X? The second thing that happens is that, again because the question is genuine, you learn that it’s not obvious to your inquisitor that X is the right thing to do.
That’s compelling information if you happened to be wondering whether X is in fact the right thing to do. And no matter how successful you are at coming up with an answer as to why on Earth you want to do X, that information will make you at least slightly less sanguine about doing X.
And that is why you can’t have a world without rhetorical questions. Because in a world without rhetorical questions, questions are effective rhetoric. Indeed a world without rhetorical questions maximizes the rhetorical value of a question.
In a world where all questions are interpreted as genuine queries, someone who is not genuinely inquisitive but in fact has an agenda most effectively erodes your confidence in X by saying “Why on Earth would you want to do X?” And so questions spontaneously become rhetorical devices.
As these devices are used more and more, the questions are taken less and less literally. In equilibrium the incentive to convert rhetorical arguments into questions continues right up until the point where questions have no rhetorical value over and above just saying outright “X sucks.”
That doesn’t mean that rhetorical questions die away. They must continue to be used just frequently enough so that their value is just degraded enough so that nobody has any (strict) incentive to use them any more than that.
(Drawing: Something About Relationships from www.f1me.net)
This is something I have wondered about for a long time.
When the muscle is stretched, so is the muscle spindle (see section Proprioceptors). The muscle spindle records the change in length (and how fast) and sends signals to the spine which convey this information. This triggers the stretch reflex (also called themyotatic reflex) which attempts to resist the change in muscle length by causing the stretched muscle to contract. The more sudden the change in muscle length, the stronger the muscle contractions will be (plyometric, or “jump”, training is based on this fact). This basic function of the muscle spindle helps to maintain muscle tone and to protect the body from injury.
One of the reasons for holding a stretch for a prolonged period of time is that as you hold the muscle in a stretched position, the muscle spindle habituates (becomes accustomed to the new length) and reduces its signaling. Gradually, you can train your stretch receptors to allow greater lengthening of the muscles.
Some sources suggest that with extensive training, the stretch reflex of certain muscles can be controlled so that there is little or no reflex contraction in response to a sudden stretch. While this type of control provides the opportunity for the greatest gains in flexibility, it also provides the greatest risk of injury if used improperly. Only consummate professional athletes and dancers at the top of their sport (or art) are believed to actually possess this level of muscular control.
This clarified a lot for me.
In many situations, such reinforcement learning is an essential strategy, allowing people to optimize behavior to fit a constantly changing situation. However, the Israeli scientists discovered that it was a terrible approach in basketball, as learning and performance are “anticorrelated.” In other words, players who have just made a three-point shot are much more likely to take another one, but much less likely to make it:
What is the effect of the change in behaviour on players’ performance? Intuitively, increasing the frequency of attempting a 3pt after made 3pts and decreasing it after missed 3pts makes sense if a made/missed 3pts predicted a higher/lower 3pt percentage on the next 3pt attempt. Surprizingly [sic], our data show that the opposite is true. The 3pt percentage immediately after a made 3pt was 6% lower than after a missed 3pt. Moreover, the difference between 3pt percentages following a streak of made 3pts and a streak of missed 3pts increased with the length of the streak. These results indicate that the outcomes of consecutive 3pts are anticorrelated.
This anticorrelation works in both directions. as players who missed a previous three-pointer were more likely to score on their next attempt. A brick was a blessing in disguise.
The underlying study, showing a “failure of reinforcement learning” is here.
Suppose you just hit a 3-pointer and now you are holding the ball on the next possession. You are an experienced player (they used NBA data), so you know if you are truly on a hot streak or if that last make was just a fluke. The defense doesn’t. What the defense does know is that you just made that last 3-pointer and therefore you are more likely to be on a hot streak and hence more likely than average to make the next 3-pointer if you take it. Likewise, if you had just missed the last one, you are less likely to be on a hot streak, but again only you would know for sure. Even when you are feeling it you might still miss a few.
That means that the defense guards against the three-pointer more when you just made one than when you didn’t. Now, back to you. You are only going to shoot the three pointer again if you are really feeling it. That’s correlated with the success of your last shot, but not perfectly. Thus, the data will show the autocorrelation in your 3-point shooting.
Furthermore, when the defense is defending the three-pointer you are less likely to make it, other things equal. Since the defense is correlated with your last shot, your likelihood of making the 3-pointer is also correlated with your last shot. But inversely this time: if you made the last shot the defense is more aggressive so conditional on truly being on a hot streak and therefore taking the next shot, you are less likely to make it.
(Let me make the comparison perfectly clear: you take the next shot if you know you are hot, but the defense defends it only if you made the last shot. So conditional on taking the next shot you are more likely to make it when the defense is not guarding against it, i.e. when you missed the last one.)
You shoot more often and miss more often conditional on a previous make. Your private information about your make probability coupled with the strategic behavior of the defense removes the paradox. It’s not possible to “arbitrage” away this wedge because whether or not you are “feeling it” is exogenous.
I will be there Feb 13-14, and I need to book a hotel. Never been there before. Here is a list of hotels to choose from along the Orange Metro Line, I care more about the neighborhood (walking/hanging/restaurant scene, breakfast joint) than the hotel. Any suggestions?
As reported by Josh Gans:
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.
Acquired traits passed on to descendants:
“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
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.)
Defamation is the making of a false statement that creates a negative image of another person. At a superficial level the point of anti-defamation laws are to prevent such false statements. But false statements by themselves are not damaging unless they do harm to the subject’s reputation. For that, the statement must be credible.
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.
57 pages and not a single mention of me. Via Ryan Lizza, with a story here.
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.
Faced with a morally ambiguous choice, you are sometimes torn between conflicting motivations. And it can get to the point where you can’t really figure out which one is really driving you. Are you calling your old girlfriend because only she can give you the right advice about your sick cat, or because you just want to hear her voice? Are you recommending your colleague for the committee because he’s the right guy for the job or because you don’t want to do it yourself? Do you write a daily blog because it’s a great way to hash out new ideas or because you just love the attention?
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.
And for some reason they always seem to go up at exactly those times when you want to buy. Like Taxis on New Year’s Eve.
Mr. Whaley was using Uber, a service that allows people to order livery cabs through a smartphone application. On New Year’s Eve, Uber, a start-up in the city, adopted a feature it called “surge pricing,” which increases the price of rides as more people request them.
Although New Year’s Eve was very profitable for Uber, customers were not happy. Many felt the pricing was exorbitant and they took to Twitter and the Web to complain. Some people said that at certain times in the evening, rides had spiked to as high as seven times the usual price, and they called it highway robbery.
Informing passengers only ex post may not be the ideal way to implement it though.
Uber’s goal is to make the experience as simple as possible, so customers are not shown their fare until the end of the ride, when it is automatically charged to their credit card. While the app does not show the total fare in dollars when customers book a ride, Uber did show a “surge pricing” multiple to customers booking rides for New Year’s Eve.
The article is an interesting read if for no other reason than the quotes from Dirk Bergemann and Liran Einav. Thanks to Toomas Hinnosaar for the pointer.
He is the editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Once a paper is allocated the assigned editor typically reads the paper within 1 day and decides whether to send the paper out to referees or to “desk reject” it. Since we receive over 1,400 submissions and only publish around 40 to 44 papers a year, we need to be tough in the initial screening and only send a paper out to referees if it has great promise to be a significant contribution. This past year we desk rejected 62 percent of the new submissions (which still means that over 500 were sent to referees). I am the “softy” among QJE editors desk rejecting “only” 47 percent of new submissions vs. 70 percent by my co-editors. I also try to provide authors with some brief feedback on their papers and the rationale for the decision even in the case of desk rejections.
The full interview is here. Thanks to Econjeff for the pointer.
I write all the time about strategic behavior in athletic competitions. A racer who is behind can be expected to ease off and conserve on effort since effort is less likely to pay off at the margin. Hence so will the racer who is ahead, etc. There is evidence that professional golfers exhibit such strategic behavior, this is the Tiger Woods effect.
We may wonder whether other animals are as strategically sophisticated as we are. There have been experiments in which monkeys play simple games of strategy against one another, but since we are not even sure humans can figure those out, that doesn’t seem to be the best place to start looking.
I would like to compare how humans and other animals behave in a pure physical contest like a race. Suppose the animals are conditioned to believe that they will get a reward if and only if they win a race. Will they run at maximum speed throughout regardless of their position along the way? Of course “maximum speed” is hard to define, but a simple test is whether the animal’s speed at a given point in the race is independent of whether they are ahead or behind and by how much.
And if the animals learn that one of them is especially fast, do they ease off when racing against her? Do the animals exhibit a tiger Woods effect?
There are of course horse-racing data. That’s not ideal because the jockey is human. Still there’s something we can learn from horse racing. The jockey does not internalize 100% of the cost of the horse’s effort. Thus there should be less strategic behavior in horse racing than in races between humans or between jockey-less animals. Dog racing? Does that actually exist?
And what if a dog races against a human, what happens then?
(Regular readers of this blog will know that I consider that to be a good thing.)
A father wants to encourage his daughter to take on a challenging new piece for the piano. Both father and daughter agree that it would be worth the effort if she could be expected to succeed but the daughter is pessimistic about her abilities. The father isn’t sure either but, having taught her older sister to play that piece, he knows a little more than the daughter about the difficulties involved and he is optimistic. How can he encourage her?
He has a problem because she sees through his cheap talk. She knows that he wants her to give it a try and so she knows that he would say whatever it would take to boost her confidence, even if he was really just as pessimistic as she.
However, things are different if she has reference-dependent utility. In particular suppose that, perhaps because of the way she has been raised, once her own expectations have been lifted she would stubbornly persist, even in the face of failure, for fear of falling below those expectations. (Indeed this might be why she was reluctant to take on the challenge at the beginning.)
Paradoxically, this behavioral quirk solves the father’s credibility problem. Because the last thing he wants is for his daughter to drive herself to tears in a futile attempt to learn a too-difficult piece. Now if he really thinks she’s not good enough, he won’t want to create any illusions. He wouldn’t even suggest it. So when he does suggest it and he does encourage her, she knows that he really believes in her. And he should know, so she tries.
That’s the idea in the job market paper of Edoardo Grillo from Princeton.
Doctors sometimes resist prescribing costly diagnostic procedures, saying that the result of the test would be unlikely to affect the course of treatment. But what we know about placebo effects for medicine should have implications also for the value of information, even when it leads to no objective health benefits.
I have a theory of how placebos work. The idea is that our bodies, either through conscious choices that we make or simply through physiological changes, must make an investment in order to get healthy. Being sick is like being, perhaps temporarily, below the threshold where the body senses that the necessary investment is worth it. A placebo tricks the body into thinking that we are going to get at least marginally more healthy and that pushes above the threshold triggering the investment which makes us healthy.
The same idea can justify providing information that has no instrumental value. Suppose you have an injury and are considering having an MRI to determine how serious it is. Your doctor says that surgery is rarely worthwhile and so even if the MRI shows a serious injury it won’t affect how you are treated.
But you want to know. For one thing the information can affect how you personally manage the injury. That’s instrumental value that your doctor doesn’t take into account.
But even if there were nothing you could consciously do based on the test result, there may be a valuable placebo reason to have the MRI. If you find out that the injury is mild, the psychological effect of knowing that you are healthy (or at least healthier than you previously thought) can be self-reinforcing.
The downside of course is that when you find out that the injury is serious you get an anti-placebo effect. So the question is whether you are better off on average when you become better informed about your true health status.
If the placebo effect works because the belief triggers a biological response then this is formally equivalent to a standard model of decision-making under uncertainty. Whenever a decision-maker will optimally condition his decision on the realization of information, then the expected value of learning that information is positive.
Comedians are loath to follow a better act. But musicians not so much. Definitely not academics. Why?
- Comedy is more vertically differentiated. It’s really funny, just a little funny, or not funny. The subject matter adds another dimension but that’s not so important for the ultimate impact. Music is more horizontally differentiated. So the opening act can be really good at what they do, but you can still please the audience if you’re not quite as good but do something different. On this score academics are more like musicians.
- Laughs are physical. You only have so many of those to give in a night. Wheras good music has the effect of putting you in a mental state that makes you more receptive to even more music. Here academic talks are more like comedy. The audience gets taxed.
- Headlining musicians always degrade the quality of the opening act by giving them less stage space and limited lighting and other effects. In large conferences academics do the same thing by distinguishing the “plenary” talks from the rest. (Get this: in Istanbul this summer I am giving a semi-plenary talk.) There is no obvious way to do this for comedy.
- Music is played by groups, comedians are always solo. Somehow the head-to-head comparison is less exact for groups. Solo singers are probably more reluctant to follow better singers than groups are when following other groups. Academics get to blame their backstage co-authors.
If you buy something online using PayPal and upon delivery it turns out to be not what was advertised, PayPal might refund your payment and require you to destroy the item:
I sold an old French violin to a buyer in Canada, and the buyer disputed the label.
This is not uncommon. In the violin market, labels often mean little and there is often disagreement over them. Some of the most expensive violins in the world have disputed labels, but they are works of art nonetheless.
Rather than have the violin returned to me, PayPal made the buyer DESTROY the violinin order to get his money back. They somehow deemed the violin as “counterfeit” even though there is no such thing in the violin world.
PayPal required the buyer to photograph the remains to prove it was destroyed. (How else can you prove to PayPal that the item wasn’t worth the money?) Glengarry glide: Eitan Hochster.
Alex Madrigal endorses this game:
“Don’t Be A Di*k During Meals With Friends.”
The first person to crack and look at their phone picks up the check.
Our (initial) purpose of the game was to get everyone off the phones free from twitter/fb/texting and to encourage conversations.
Rules:
1) The game starts after everyone has ordered.
2) Everybody places their phone on the table face down.
3) The first person to flip over their phone loses the game.
4) Loser of the game pays for the bill.
5) If the bill comes before anyone has flipped over their phone everybody is declared a winner and pays for their own meal.
The problem with this implementation is that once one person cracks, she’s paying for the meal regardless of what happens next and so all the incentive power is gone. It’ll be a twitter/fb/texting free-for-all.
A more sophisticated approach is to make the last person who uses their phone pay for the meal. Its subtle: no matter how many people have used their phone already, everybody else has maximal incentives not to be the next one. Because by backward induction they will be the last one and instead of a free meal they will pay for everyone.
But even that has its problems because the first guy has no incentives left. So you could do something like this: At the beginning everyone is paying their own meal. The first one to use their phone has to pay also for the meal of one other person. The next person who uses their phone, including possibly if the first guy does it again, has to pay for all the meals that the previous guy had to pay for plus one more.
It would take a lot of mistakes to run out of incentives with that scheme but even if you do you can start paying for the people in the table next to you.
Barretina bump: Courtney Conklin Knapp
Some topics evolve by occasional big news events interspersed by long periods of little or no news. The public reacts dramatically to the big news events and seems to ignore the slow news.
For example, a terrorist attack is followed by general paranoia and a tightening of security. But no matter how much time passes without another attack, there never seems to be a restoration of the old equilibrium. News is like a ratchet with each big reaction building directly upon the last, and the periods in-between only setting the stage for the next.
The usual way to interpret this is an over-reaction to the salient information brought by big news events, and a failure to respond to the subtle information conveyed by a lack of big news. We notice when the dog barks but we don’t notice when it doesn’t.
But even a perfectly rational and sophisticated public exhibits a news ratchet. That’s because there is a difference between big news and small news in the way it galvanizes the public. Large changes in policy require a coordinated movement by a correspondingly large enough segment of the population motivated to make the change. Individuals are so motivated only if they know that they are part of a large enough group. Big events create that knowledge.
During the slow news periods all of these individuals are learning that those measures are less and less necessary. But that learning takes place privately and in silence. Never will enough time pass that everyone can confidently conclude that everyone else has confidently concluded that …. that everyone has figured this out. So there will never be the same momentum to undo the initial reaction as there was to inflame it.
It pays $72,000 per year and comes with only two requirements, one is flexible and one is not:
At first glance, Robert Kirshner took the e-mail message for a scam. An astronomer at King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was offering him a contract for an adjunct professorship that would pay $72,000 a year. Kirshner, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, would be expected to supervise a research group at KAU and spend a week or two a year on KAU’s campus, but that requirement was flexible, the person making the offer wrote in the e-mail. What Kirshner would be required to do, however, was add King Abdulaziz University as a second affiliation to his name on the Institute for Scientific Information’s (ISI’s) list of highly cited researchers.
As you read on, ask yourself whether a chaired professorship endowed by King Abdulaziz would survive the various criticisms. I thank Ryan McDevitt for the pointer.
I hadn’t watched American football in many years but around Christmas time I watched a little bit with my son who is getting old enough to pay attention to it. What struck me was how many pointless rules there are in football. I asked myself which of the many pointless rules is the most pointless. Some candidate
1.Holding
2. Illegal motion
These two are basically rules that establish a conventional way to play the game. If you dropped these rules you would still have a game that makes sense but aesthetically you could argue the game is less attractive. Players grabbing each others uniforms, offensive players running around before the snap. It’s a matter of taste but the deadweight loss is the subjective element of enforcement. Bottom line: artificial rules but not totally pointless.
3. Intentional grounding. This rule has a point but its a stupid point. The quarterback can’t throw the ball just anywhere, he has to throw it near somebody who could legally catch it. Or he can throw it out of bounds, it seems. But if he can’t do any of those he has to get mowed down by a charging defender.
But here’s the most pointless rule I could come up with:
4. Ineligible Receiver Downfield. There are only certain players on the offense who are designated as eligible to catch a pass. If anybody else catches a pass then it doesn’t count. Now that by itself is pretty artificial. Those players, and their counterparts on the defense are basically added to the game just to offset one another. You could remove them from both sides and it would be a wash. But even more pointless: an ineligible player is not allowed to advance down the field when a pass is thrown, even if it is thrown to somebody else. These rules essentially provide job security for giant, immobile humanoids whose only function is to stand in the way of somebody else. They take away the possibility of having a team of 10 perfectly substitutable athletes plus a quarterback. I can’t see how that would not be a more interesting game.
Is there any more pointless rule than that?
(Regular readers of this blog will know I consider that a good thing.)
Why did Apple enter an exclusive partnership with AT&T? Michael Sinkinson has a nice theoretical model that shows how vertical exclusivity can soften competition. A smartphone requires an accompanying wireless service in order to be useful. While smartphones are differentiated goods, wireless service is pretty homogenous. The market for wireless service is therefore perfectly competitive while the market for smartphones is oligopolistic.
Suppose smartphone manufacturers allow their phones to operate on any wireless network. Then service plans for the iPhone and for the Blackberry would be priced perfectly competitively, at the marginal cost of providing service. That means that the total price of an iPhone bundled with wireless service will be equal to the wholesale price that Apple charges the wireless providers. In other words, Apple’s price increases are passed on dollar-for-dollar to the consumer.
At an equilibrium Apple raises its price for the iPhone up to the point where the revenues from additional price increases are offset by reduced sales (due to higher prices.) Blackberry does the same.
Now, suppose that Apple goes exclusive with AT&T. That makes AT&T the monopoly retail supplier of the iPhone. They will act like a monopoly and raise prices. AT&T views Apple’s wholesale price as an input cost and we know from basic price theory that increases in input costs are passed on less than dollar-for-dollar to consumers. The strategic effect for Apple is that now when Apple increases the wholesale price of the iPhone, sales fall off by less than they did in the non-exclusive arrangement. It’s as if the demand curve has gotten steeper. Relative to the non-exclusive arrangement Apple raises prices, and in fact as a response Blackberry also raises prices which has a secondary benefit for Apple.
Of course some of these new profits go to the retailer, AT&T. No problem. Forseeing all of this Apple and AT&T agreed to a large up-front transfer from AT&T to Apple equal to that amount.
Fracking. Water is pumped into mines at high pressure to fracture the rock and release natural gas. There is some controversy associated with how the water is disposed of when the fracking is done. In Ohio the water is deposited in deep waste-water wells which happen to be near tectonic fault lines. Probably not coincidentally there have been many earthquakes nearby over the past year. These earthquakes have been small, the largest being about a 4.0 on New Year’s Eve.
The controversy is whether the waste water disposal is causing the earthquakes and whether this externality is properly accounted for in the fracking calculus. Bear in find that it’s not the fracking itself that causes the earthquakes.
An earthquake is a release of pressure. The theory here is that the water in the deep wells lubricates the fault line and allows the release of the pressure built up along fault lines. Fracking, and the associated disposal, adds only negligibly to the total pressure built up over time. That pressure is caused by the geological processes in the Earth. That is, the total quantity of earthquakes over the lifetime of the Earth is a constant, independent of fracking.
What fracking does is re-allocate that supply of earthquakes toward the present, and possibly toward specific locations. If the disutiliy of earthquakes was linear in the timing and quantity of earthquakes, there would be no aggregate welfare effects.
But probably that disutility is convex. Many small earthquakes are preferred to one large one. The disposal of water in deep wells releases pressure sooner and avoids the buildup that would cause a large earthquake. Under this theory the externality from fracking is positive.
They should start fracking in California.
I have known Larry since the time I was on the junior job market and he was winding down a spectacular term as chairman of the BU economics department, having built a top-ten department out of nothing. Eight years later I spent a year as a faculty member at BU and again Larry was chairman. Everybody who has spent any time with Larry in a professional capacity agrees that he is a natural-born leader. He just has this quality that draws people from all sides to his. And he knows how to make an organization work. On top of all that he is great economist with world-leading expertise on the topics that would be most important for a President right now to know. I honestly can’t think of anybody I know personally who would make a better President than Larry. I might even vote for him.
Here’s his campaign web page. Via Tyler Cowen on Twitter.
An n-candidate election in which the electorate views n-1 of the candidates as equivalent alternatives to the nth. But they need to solve the coordination problem of which one to vote for. A prediction market allows speculators to drive up the price of any one of them, convincing the voters that he is the focal point and winning, or conversely to jam the signal by equalizing their share prices while at the same time going long on the nth. Of course the voters know this, but they may not know that all of the voters know (etc) this.
How informative can prediction markets be in such a scenario? I think Justin Wolfers might be interested in the answer.
See Rajiv Sethi for related thoughts.
Cheap Talk 