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After a day of conference talks, but before drinks arrive, game theorists have been known to debate whether what is known as Zermelo’s theorem was actually proved by Zermelo. Eran Shmaya (who is always fun to talk to with or without drinks) decided to go and look at the paper (recently translated) and all but strips Zermelo of his theorem.
So, Zermelo clearly did not set out to prove his eponymous theorem. But was he aware of it ? I guess the answer depends on what you mean by being aware of a mathematical statement (were you aware of the fact that any even number greater than 2 can be written as a sum of a prime number and an even number before you read this sentence ?). But I do believe that some of the logical implications in Zermelo’s paper only make sense if you already assume his theorem.
Via kottke, Clusterflock gives five simple rules for effective bidding on eBay:
Step One:Find the product you want.
Step Two:
Save the product to your watch list.
Step Three:
Wait.
Step Four:
Just before the item ends, enter the maximum amount you are willing to pay for the item.
Step Five:
Click submit.
This is called sniping. That’s a pejorative label for what is actually a sensible and perfectly straightforward way to bid. eBay is essentially an open second-price auction and sniping is a way to submit a “sealed” bid. It’s a popular strategy and advocated by many eBay “experts.” But does it really pay off?
Tanjim Hossain and I did an experiment (ungated version.) We compared sniping to another straightforward strategy we call squatting. As the name suggests, squatting means bidding your value on an object at the very first opportunity, essentially staking a claim on that object. We bid on DVDs and randomly divided auctions into two groups, sniping on the auctions in the first group and squatting on the other.
The two strategies were almost indistinguishable in terms of their payoff. But for an interesting reason. A lot of eBay bidders use a strategy of incremental bidding. That’s where you act as if you are involved in an ascending auction (like an English auction) and you bid the minimum amount needed to become the high biddder. Once you are the high bidder you stop there and wait to see if you are outbid, then you raise your bid again. You do this until either you win or the price goes above the maximum amount you are willing to pay.
Against incremental bidders, sniping has a benefit and a cost (relative to squatting.) You benefit when incremental bidders stop at a price below their value. You swoop in at the end, the incremental bidders have no time to respond, and you win at the low price.
The cost has to do with competition across auctions for similar objects. If I squat on auction A and you are sniping in auction B, our opponents think there is one fewer competitor in auction B and more opponents enter auction B than A. This tends to raise the price in your auction relative to mine. In other words, squatting scares opponents away, sniping does not.
We found that these two effects almost exactly canceled each other out for auctions of DVDs. We expect that this would be true for similar objects that are homogeneous and sold in many simultaneous auctions. So the next time you are bidding in such an auction, don’t think too hard and just bid your value.
Now, I am still trying to figure out what I am going to do with all these copies of 50 First Dates we won in the experiment.
Steven Landsburg set 10 questions for honors graduates at Oberlin College. #8 is a great undergraduate game theory exercise:
Question 8. The five Dukes of Earl are scheduled to arrive at the royal palace on each of the first five days of May. Duke One is scheduled to arrive on the first day of May, Duke Two on the second, etc. Each Duke, upon arrival, can either kill the king or support the king. If he kills the king, he takes the king’s place, becomes the new king, and awaits the next Duke’s arrival. If he supports the king, all subsequent Dukes cancel their visits. A Duke’s first priority is to remain alive, and his second priority is to become king. Who is king on May 6?
visor volley: BoingBoing.
Chris Blattman writes:
Strategy part 3: Figure out the national bargaining fraction. Anchor too low and some cabbies will simply stop talking to you. Unfortunately, that fraction is hard to predict. In Ethiopia, it seems to be about 70%. He’ll counter with 130% the target, and you get to the price you want in about two rounds. Very civilized. This, of course, is based on a sample of four. But my standard error is very low.
I especially love discovering the bargaining fraction and number of rounds in a country. Within a city it is surprisingly consistent, from taxis to markets. Cross-country variation is huge.
Based on travel this year, here is my guesstimation of starting fraction and rounds:
- Ethiopia: 0.7 with 2 rounds
- Argentina: no less than 0.9 and 1 round.
- Canada: 1 and 0
- Uganda: 0.5 and 4 rounds
- Liberia: 0.1 and 8 rounds
- Morocco: 0.001 and upwards of 754 rounds (including mint tea).
I don’t do that much exotic international travel, but I do recall in Singapore that there was no negotiation at all but still it was impossible to know what the fare was because the meter was programmed with all kinds of fixed charges, surcharges and variable mileage rates depending on time of day. Plus major roads have tolls that are adjusted every second depending on traffic and the risk was born by the passengers. So I would call Singapore a 1, -1. (It was always dirt cheap in the end anyway.)
I am a lousy mathematician. I can’t do algebra. My eyes glaze over when asked to follow calculations on the board. And I have a really bad memory. These are just a few of my keys to success.
Because I have minimal facility with technical arguments I had to learn early on how to translate them into natural language so that I could understand them. It takes a long time. And quite often its just impossible to do. In those cases I have to give up.
But when it works, I come away with a unique way of explaining things that are otherwise “left to the appendix.” It makes for good seminars. And it makes teaching time consuming but fun.
Best of all is that enough practice with this and it begins to pay off in research. I can’t “figure things out” with a pen and pad in front of me. Instead I start with an intuition, explain it to myself in a natural language, and see where that goes. Progress usually means formalizing the intuition, seeing some implications on paper, and then retranslating those back, etc. (It helps when I have the talented co-authors I work with.)
I count this liability as a virtue because a) I have to find something to say I am good at, b) being able to explain things in plain language is a valuable skill which I am forced to acquire and c) I’d like to think that it acts as a mild fiddle-filter. If I try hard and I can’t explain it convincingly it words, I am content to say that it must not be a compelling idea. (Not to say that silly ideas don’t nevertheless sometimes slip through the filter.)
One of the least enjoyable tasks of a journal editor is to nag referees to send reports. Many things have been tried to induce timeliness and responsiveness. We give deadlines. We allow referees to specify their own deadlines. We use automated nag-mails. We even allow referees to opt-in to automated nag-mails (they do and then still ignore them.)
When time has dragged on and a referee is not responding it is typical to send a message saying something like “please let me know if you still plan to provide a report, otherwise i will try to do without it.” These are usually ignored.
A few years ago I tried something new and every time since then it has gotten an almost immediate response, even from referees who have ignored multiple previous nudges. I have suggested it to other editors I know and it works for them too. I have an intuition for why it works (and that’s why I tried it in the first place) but I can’t quite articulate it, perhaps you have ideas. Here is the clinching message:
Dear X
I would like to respond soon to the authors but it would help me a lot if I could have your report. I realize that you are very busy, so if you think you will be able to send me a report within the next week, then please let me know. If you don’t think you will be able to send a report, then there is no need to respond to this message.
I listen to Pandora whenever I am in my office. It does a pretty good job of finding music that matches my taste, sometimes a really good job. In the past few weeks I’ve found some stuff that was completely new to me that I really liked. I created a station based on these tunes:
- Beep! Marty’s Mishap. I have never heard of this trio and as far as I can tell google has not either. The rhythm is an instrument if that makes any sense. This is exactly the kind of music I like.
- Nels Cline, Alstromeria. I don’t know how to classify this music. The guitar playing is virtuosity without showing off. The composition is academic without feeling pretentious.
- Tomasz Stanko Quartet, Kattorna. I first learned of this quartet in a roundabout way. The rhythm section has a few albums as a trio (The Marcin Waslez-somethingPolish-ski Trio) that I found on Pandora and really like. Then I learned that their main gig is this quartet led by trumpeter Tomasz Stanko. The quartet may be even better. Listen to what the piano is doing during the trumpet solos.
- Erik Friedlander, Quake. He plays cello. Lots of other people play lots of other instruments. Sometimes all at once. The music ranges from controlled chaos to the beautifully melodic.
- Rolf Lislevand, Toccata. Nuove Musiche with a modern sensibility. Beautiful.
- Moraz & Bruford, Living Space. Piano and drums, that’s it. But the pianist thinks he is playing the drums and the drummer thinks he is playing the piano.
All week this will be my music to read job-market files to. Join me.
Ahh, Evans Hall… (this is old yes, but still funny.)
Tongue-in-cheek relationship advice from evolutionary psychology (via Mindhacks.)
Some Darwinists might say your optimal strategy would be to pair-bond with the older male but surreptitiously allow the younger, sexy male to fertilise you. But be careful, most men consider being cuckolded the greatest of betrayals.
And how about this?
You should have your husband medically assessed. It may be that some form of genetic disorder underlies his erratic behaviour, in which case he will need counselling and support. But you will also need to inform your daughters so that, if they are carriers, they do not themselves mate with men suffering from the same condition.
My 3rd-grade daughter had some interesting social science homework this week. Classify each of the following statements as either a fact or an opinion. (The first two are easy warm-ups.)
- As footwear, moccasins are better than sneakers.
- There are Iroquois living in New York State today.
- Many Native Americans were expert craftsmen.
- The Native American diet was more nutritious than our own.
- Europeans had no right to settle in North America.
- Native Americans should be treated with great respect.
The answers are after the jump. This is a public school. Still, be careful with your expectations about political correctness (and reverse political correctness.)
A simple implication of sexual selection is that there should be a correlation between features that attract us sexually and characteristics that make our offspring more fit. Here is an article that studies the link between physical attraction and success in sport.
The better an American football player, the more attractive he is, concludes a team led by Justin Park at the University of Bristol, UK. Park’s team had women rate the attractiveness of National Football League (NFL) quarterbacks: all were elite players, but the best were rated as more desirable.
Meanwhile, a survey of more than a thousand New Scientist Twitter followers reveals a similar trend for professional men’s tennis players.
Neither Park nor New Scientist argue that good looks promote good play. Rather, the same genetic variations could influence both traits.
“Athletic prowess may be a sexually selected trait that signals genetic quality,” Park says. So the same genetic factors that contribute to a handsome mug may also offer a slight competitive advantage to professional athletes.
Studies like this are prone to endogeneity problems because success also feeds back on physical attraction. At the extreme, we know who Roger Federer is and that gets in the way of judging his attractiveness directly. More subtly, if you show me pictures of two anonymous athletes, the one who is more successful has probably also trained better, eaten better, been raised differently and these are all endogenous characteristics that affect attractiveness directly. Knowing that they correlate with success doesn’t tell us whether “success genes” have physically attractive manifestations.
One way to improve the study would be to look at adopted children. Show subjects pictures of the athletes’ biological parents and ask the subjects to rate the attractiveness of the parents. Then correlate the responses with the performance of the children. If these children were raised by randomly selected parents (obviously that is not exactly the case) then we would be picking up the effect of exogenous sources of physical attractiveness passed on only through the genes of the parents.
And why stop with success in sport. Physical attractiveness should be correlated with intelligence, social mobility, etc.
Why is blackmail illegal? Sure it’s mean and all but what makes it a crime? This article raises some questions about the legal scholarship behind blackmail. (The background is the Letterman case.)
Whether or not this is how Hollywood really works, Shargel does have a point of logic. The reasoning that makes blackmail illegal–and a great many other similar business activities not illegal — is something that’s never been satisfactorily explained by legal scholars. It remains a paradox of the law. That said, Halderman and Shargel shouldn’t hold their breath until January, when a judge will rule on their motion to dismiss. Even if it makes no sense, blackmail remains a serious crime.
What about the economics of blackmail? There is one obvious economic rationale for making blackmail a crime: rent-seeking. Seeking out and producing incriminating evidence for the express purpose of ultimately keeping it secret is a waste of labor resources and should be discouraged. And this idea explains an otherwise puzzling asymmetry. That is, presumably I can legally accept payment in return for publicizing good information about you. That is tantamount to threatening not to publicize it if you don’t pay me. Whether I threaten withold good information about you or actively publicize bad information about you I am arguably doing the same thing: threatening to lower your reputation relative to what it would otherwise be.
The economic difference is that allowing blackmail leads to unproductive rent-seeking whereas allowing me to charge you for good publicity incentivizes productive information-gathering.
In rare cases blackmail is efficient. If I want you to dig up the dirt on me (perhaps to keep it out of more dangerous hands) we have an incentive problem. I can’t pay you up front because then you have no incentive to do the search. You will come back claiming that my record is so clean that despite all your efforts you came up empty-handed. Instead I would like to pay you ex post in return for the documents. But once you’ve already sunk the cost of searching, I will hold you up and try to renegotiate the fee. The information is not worth anything to you since blackmail is illegal. We would both prefer to allow you to blackmail me ex post. That way I am effectively commited to pay you for your service and you will work hard.
You can trust me to pay you for the information but now the problem is that I can’t trust you. You will show me only half of what you found and blackmail me to keep that a secret. Once you have your money you will show me the other half and blackmail me again. Forseeing this I won’t pay you the first time.
Once you think of this its hard to see how blackmail works at all and why we need to even make it illegal. The blackmailer has to somehow prove that he is not hiding any additional information. That is probably impossible because any incriminating evidence can be copied.
Maybe the problem can be solved with a reciprocal arrangement. You dig up some dirt on me and yourself. Then you offer me the following deal. I pay you the hush money and you hand over the information about you. I will pay you because in return I get a threat against you which deters you from blackmailing me again.
From an entertaining article in the Financial Times that develops the analogy between the interconnectedness of financial instruments and biological ecosystems.
“From an individual firm’s perspective, these strategies looked like sensible attempts to purge risk through diversification: more eggs are being placed in the basket,” says Mr Haldane. “Viewed across the system as a whole, however, it is clear now that these strategies generated the opposite result: the greater the number of eggs, the greater the fragility of the basket – and the greater the probability of bad eggs.”
That is what a mathematical ecologist would have predicted if he or she had known what was going on in the world of finance. The tropical rainforest, for example, has so many interdependent species that it is more vulnerable to an external shock than the simpler ecological diversity of savannahs and grasslands.
I wonder what prescription naturally arises from this perspective? Total laissez-faire so that the financial system can suffer enough crashes, extinctions, and re-organizations to find a configuration that is stable for the long run? Would we someday see Business schools sending missions out to shuttering financial institutions clamoring for intervention in the name of preserving derivative-diversity. What is the analog of sexual reproduction and random genetic mixing?
This article from New Scientist asks whether sleep walkers can be held morally responsible for acts committed while unconscious. A different question is what effect a sleepwalker exception would have on crime. Would it encourage sleepwalkers to commit more crimes, or on the extensive margin would it encourage more to people to take up sleepwalking?
I have no personal experience, but if sleepwalkers believe they are awake, then they would not be motivated by an exemption for sleepwalkers. Of course at any moment in time all of us may be sleepwalking and assuming we all account for that small probability, a sleepwalker exemption would encourage more crime across the board. This could be easily compensated by a small, uniform increase in penalties.
We shold worry that non-sleepwalkers will make use of the additional defense at trial (the “jammie defense?”)
Nightcap Nod: Mindhacks.
I am going to write an insurance contract with you. We agree that if an accident happens I will cover you unless you a type prone to accident or you don’t try hard enough to avoid an accident.
There are two ways we can implement these conditionals. We could investigate whether they hold at the time we sign the contract or we could wait until an accident happens. Since an accident is unlikely to happen, the second method often avoids unnecessary costs of investigation and makes it cheaper to enforce the contract. That means I can offer you a lower premium.
All of this assumes that the conditions that would nullify the contract are
- completely described either in the contract or in law,
- fully understood by the insured, and
- within the information set of the insured
Arguments against rescision can be based on any one of these three being violated. Certainly #1 is violated in practice if insurance companies are free to present any evidence suggestive of, for example, pre-existing conditions. Violations of #2 plagues all economic analysis of contracts, no doubt it is a problem here as well. And an argument against recision could be based on #3, even if we assume that contracts are complete and voluntary.
Indeed I believe that #3 is the basis for a response to the obvious “If allowing for recision is against the interests of the insured, why don’t insurers compete by offering no-rescision contracts.” These would have higher premiums for the reasons given above. Insurees would tend to reject these in favor of lower-premium rescision-permitting contracts when they are not aware of buried, jargon-laden, medical records that would nullify their coverage. In fact, the asymmetric access to this information superimposes an artificial asymmetric information problem on an insurance market that is already plagued by adverse selection.
Here’s a research problem: what does a competitive equilibrium look like in an insurance market where both types of contract can be offered? Assume that the insurer has superior information about documentation of pre-existing conditions, and conditions contract terms on its private information.
Is it an infinite number of monkeys, or is it infinitely-lived monkeys? If what you want is Shakespeare with probability 1 it matters. Because Hamlet is a fixed finite string of characters. That means the monkey has to stop typing when the string is complete. If we model the monkey as a process which every second taps a random key from the keyboard according to a fixed probability distribution, then to produce the Dithering Dane he must eventually repeat the space bar (or equivalently no key at all) until his terminal date.
If that terminal date is infinity, i.e. the monkey is given infinite time, then this event has probability zero. On the other hand, an infinite number of monkeys who each live long enough, but not infinitely long, will Exuent with probability 1 as desired.
(If your criterion is simply that the text of Hamlet appear somewhere in the output string, then a) you are sorely lacking in ambition and b) it no longer matters which version of infinity you have.)
Mortarboard Missive: Marginal Revolution.
From an excellent blog, Neuroskeptic, here is a survey of some data on mental illness incidence and suicide rates across countries. The correlation is surprisingly low:
So what’s the story? Take a look –
In short, there’s no correlation. The Pearson correlation (unweighted) r = 0.102, which is extremely low. As you can see, both mental illness and suicide rates vary greatly around the world, but there’s no relationship. Japan has the second highest suicide rate, but one of the lowest rates of mental illnesses. The USA has the highest rate of mental illness, but a fairly low suicide rate. Brazil has the second highest level of mental illness but the second lowest occurrence of suicide.
Perhaps I am reacting too much to the examples in the excerpt, but one possible explanation comes from noting that there is a difference between incidence of mental illness and detection. In countries where mental illness is readily diagnosed you will see more reports of it and also (assuming it does any good) less suicide. The US must be the prime example. And as I understand it, mental illness is highly stigmatized in Japan so the effect there is exactly what the data would suggest. I don’t know about Brazil.
“You’re a cad if you break up around Christmas. And then there’s New Year’s — and you can’t dump somebody right around New Year’s. After that, if you don’t jump on it, is Valentine’s Day,” Savage says. “God forbid if their birthday should fall somewhere between November and February — then you’re really stuck.
“Thanksgiving is really when you have to pull the trigger if you’re not willing to tough it out through February.”
That’s from a story I heard on NPR about turkey dropping: the spike in break-ups at Thanksgiving followed by a steady period (for the surviving pairs) through the Winter months. If there is a social stigma against cutting it off between Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day, then there may be value in that. Often social rules emerge arbitrarily but persist only if they serve a purpose, even if that purpose is unrelated to the spirit of the social norm. The post-turkey taboo plays the role of a temporary commitment that can strengthen those relationships that are still worth maintaining.
The value of a relationship fluctuates over time. Not just the total value of the partnership relative to autarky but also the value to the individual of remaining committed. The strength of a relationship is precisely measured by the maximum temptation each partner is willing to forego to keep it alive. The moment a jucier temptation appears, the relationship is doomed.
Unless there is commitment. Commitment is a way of pooling incentive constraints. A relationship becomes stronger if each partner can somehow commit in advance to resist all temptations that will arise over the length of the commitment. This transforms your obligation. Now the strength of the relationship is equal to the expected temptation rather than the most severe temptation actually realized. A social stigma against ending the relationship over certain intervals of time aids such a commitment.
Its good that commitments are temporary, but you want their beginning and end dates to be arbitrary, or at least independent of the arrival process of temptations. The total value of the relationship also fluctuates and you want the freedom to end the relationship when it begins to lag the value of being single. This is especially true in the early stages when there is still a lot to learn about the match. Over time when the value of the relationship has clarified, the length of commitment intervals should increase.
Commitments can also solve an unraveling problem. If you know that your partner will succumb to a juciy temptation and you know that its just a matter of time before a juicy temptation arrives, you become willing to give over to a just-a-little-juicy temptation. Knowing this, she is poised to give it up for just about anything. The commitment short-circuits this at the first step.
Mind Your Decisions looks at the game theory of the classic Thanksgiving showdown between Lucy and Charlie Brown.
Time after time, Lucy would bring her football to the park and entice Charlie Brown to practice some place kicks. Lucy would hold the ball, Charlie Brown would run full-steam to kick it only to have Lucy snatch the ball away at the last minute sending Charlie Brown flying, yelling ARRRRGGGHHH and landing in a heap. What a blockhead. Sure you can understand his willingness to trust her the first time, maybe even the first two times, but after that it’s pretty clear what Lucy’s objective is.
You may try to make excuses for Charlie Brown by arguing that subgame-perfection requires a great deal of strategic sophistication. But you don’t need to invoke any refinements here. The unique Nash equilibrium action for Charlie Brown is to say no. Even worse, not yanking the ball is a weakly dominated strategy for Lucy and after that strategy is eliminated, Charlie Brown has a strongly dominant strategy to walk away.
So it is not surprising that in It’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, he has finally figured this out and flatly refuses to play Lucy’s game. That’s when she goes contract theory on him.
Now we are reaching higher-order blockheadness. First of all, whether or not the contract is valid, its terms are not verifiable to a court. And Charlie Brown should be able to figure out there is something fishy about this contract. Lucy would only offer a contract if she preferred the outcome (run, don’t yank) to the outcome (walk away). But even though Lucy has never directly revealed any preference between these two outcomes, there is pretty good evidence that the worst possible outcome for Lucy would be to see Charlie Brown successfully kick.
Indeed, Lucy knew from the beginning that Charlie Brown would eventually figure out her intention to yank the ball. After that, she knows Charlie Brown will refuse to play. So if Lucy really preferred (run, don’t yank) to (walk away) then she would prevent this evaporation of trust by allowing Charlie Brown to kick the ball at least a few times, but she never did.
The only way to rationalize Lucy’s steadfast insistence on sending him flying is to assume either that (run, don’t yank) is her least-preferred outcome, or that she thinks that Charlie Brown is indeed a blockhead and unable to deduce her intentions. In either case, Charlie Brown should have viewed Lucy’s contract with deep suspicion.
Here’s my measure of creativity. Try it before reading on. Time yourself. Let’s say 30 seconds. You are going to think of 5 words. Your goal is to come up with 5 words that are as unrelated to one another as possible. Go.
Via Jonah Lehrer, I found this article that would give some backstory to my test. I will paraphrase, but it’s worth reading the article. First of all, our memory is understood to work by passive association (as opposed to conscious recollection.) You have a thought or an experience, and memory conjures up a bunch of potentially relevant stuff. Then, subconsciously, a filter is applied which sorts through these passive recollections and finds the ones that are most relevant and allows only these to bubble up into conscious processing.
Now, there are patients with damage to areas of their brain that effectively shuts off this filter. When you ask these patients a question, they will respond with information that is no more likely to be true as it is to be completely fabricated from related memories, or even previously imagined scenarios. These people are called confabulators.
The article discusses how especially creative people with perfectly healthy brains achieve their heights of creativity by reducing activity in that area of the brain associated with the filter. The suggestion is that creativity is the result of allowing into consciousness those ideas that less creative people would inhibit on the grounds of irrelevance. And this makes sense when you realize that thought does not “create” anything that wasn’t already buried in there somewhere. Observationally, what distinguishes a creative person from the rest of us is that the creative person says and does the unexpected, “outside the box,” “out of left-field” etc.
It reinforces the view that creative work doesn’t come from active “research.” At best you can facilitate its arrival.
Catch me on the public radio program Marketplace this evening. I will be talking about pinball.
I sat here in Northwestern’s high-tech studio and talked into that thing to Kai Ryssdal.
- More than modern equipment, what the studio needs is a few candles and some incense. Also someone to look at me and pretend that everything I am saying is really interesting. A person instantly gains about 10 IQ points whenever he believes somebody is into what they are talking about.
- I don’t think I did a very good job but that’s ok. Things like this tend to feel like impending doom to me. I congratulated myself that for the first time in my life I would try to be detached and take note of what impending doom feels like.
- Like standing in front of a big class for the first time, or the first job-market seminar, or a first date the overwhelming feeling is that it’s bizarre that anyone would actually care what I am talking about. My advice when you feel that way is to embrace it as an absurd commentary on life and use that thought to help yourself smile your way through it.
Cute video from Tim Harford on the information economics of office politics.
(My theory is that in fact the managers will get stuck with cleaning coffee pots. The wage-earners are already held to reservation utility while the managers are likely earning rents. And, as illustrated in the video’s epilogue, there is no fully separating equilibrium in the “threaten to resign” game.)
Mayonnaise by hand is pretty easy and a big improvement over stuff in a jar. A great workout too. Recipes usually seem too cautious, guarding against disaster when the emulsion doesn’t work. Mine always came together without a hitch until recently I have had two occasions when it “broke” as they say. (I guess I was getting a little lax.)
In a recipe book called Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by (whatshername who was the Chef at Greens in San Francisco) there is given a method to bring a failed mayonnaise back from the dead. Tonight (making Tuna Burgers with Harissa Mayonnaise out of Fish Without a Doubt [great book!] was the occasion of my second failure and, remembering the tip, I gave it a try.
Pour 1-2 tablespoons of boiling water into the goopy mess (it really looks ugly when it goes wrong) and whisk. Viola, mayonnaise reborn. Simple as that.
Kids love harissa mayonnaise.
- The right time to shoplift.
- Fact: there was a Mr. Ely on the Mayflower. Fiction: everything written here.
You are playing in you local club golf tournament, getting ready to tee off and there is last-minute addition to the field… Tiger Woods. Will you play better or worse?
The theory of tournaments is an application of game theory used to study how workers respond when you make them compete with one another. Professional sports are ideal natural laboratories where tournament theory can be tested. An intuitive idea is that if two contestants are unequal in ability but the tournament treats them equally, then both contestants should perform poorly (relative to the case when each is competing with a similarly-abled opponent.) The stronger player is very likely to win so the weaker player conserves his effort which in turn enables the stronger player to conserve his effort and still win.
There is a paper by Kellogg professor Jennifer Brown that examines this effect in professional golf tournaments. She compares how the average competitor performs when Tiger Woods is in the tournament relative to when he is not. Controlling for a variety of factors, Tiger Woods’ presence increases (i.e. worsens, remember this is golf) the score of the average golfer, even in the first round of the tournament.
There are actually two reasons why this should be true. First is the direct incentive effect mentioned above. The other is that lesser golfers should take more risks when they are facing tougher competition. Surprisingly, this is not evident in the data. (I take this to be bad news for the theory, but the paper doesn’t draw this conclusion.)
Also, since golf is a competition among many players and there are prizes for second, third etc., the theory does not necessarily imply a Tiger Woods effect. For example, consider the second-best player. For her, what matters is the drop-off in rewards as a player falls from first to second relative to second to third. If the latter is the steeper fall, then Tiger Woods’ presence makes her work harder. Since the paper looks at the average player, then what should matter is something like concavity vs. convexity of the prize schedule.
Also, remember the hypothesis is that both players phone it in. Unfortunately we don’t have a good control for this because we can’t make Tiger Woods play against himself. Perhaps the implied empirical hypothesis says something about the relative variance in the level of play. When Tiger Woods is having a bad season, competition is tighter and that makes him work harder, blunting the effect of the downturn. When he is having a good season, he slacks off again blunting the effect of the boom. By contrast, for the weaker player the incentive effects make his effort pro-cyclical, amplifying temporal variations in ability.
Jonah Lehrer (to whom my fedora is flipped) prefers a psychological explanation.
R. Duncan Luce has been elected fellow of the Econometric Society in the year 2009. He is 84. How could it take so long?
Here’s a model. There is a large set of economists and each year you have to decide which to admit to a select group of “fellows.” Assume away the problems of committee decision-making and say that an economist will be admitted if his achievements are above some standard. The problem is that there are many economists and its costly to investigate each one to see if they pass the bar.
So you pick a shortlist of candidates who are contenders and you investigate those. Some pass, some don’t. Now, the next problem is that there are many fellows and many non-fellows and its hard to keep track of exactly who is in and who is out. And again it’s costly to go and check every vita to find out who has not been admitted yet.
So when you pick your shortlist, you are including only economists who you think are not already fellows. Someone like Duncan Luce, who certainly should have been elected 30 years ago most likely was elected 30 years ago so you would never consider putting him on your shortlist.
Indeed, the simple rule of thumb you would use is to focus on young people for your shortlist. Younger economists are more likely to be both good enough and not already fellows.
You have a great need for other people to like and admire you. You have a tendency to be critical of yourself. You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage. While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them. Your sexual adjustment has presented problems for you. Disciplined and self-controlled outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You pride yourself as an independent thinker and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. You have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be pretty unrealistic. Security is one of your major goals in life.
Thanks to Jeroen for being our first guest blogger. His posts were as fun and insightful as we expected. What a surprise to find our shared admiration for all things Tito. I am sure he regrets the association with us Palin-baiters and Asian-sweet-dissers, but if he is in the mood for some pinball, now he knows where to go.
The full title of the Dylan tune is “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again.” When you have listened to that song as much as I have you start to notice the patterns. Check out the lyrics.
- Two four-line verses with xAyA rhyme scheme, followed by the chorus “Oh Mama, can this really be the end?…”
- The first verse in the pair introduces a character and a scene and there is some hint of strangeness about it. As with a lot of Dylan tunes the character is often a vague literary reference or some generic symbol of authority. Sometimes both.
- The narrator usually first appears in the second verse of the pair, possibly alongside a new character.
- In the second half the narrator has some sense of disconnection with the scene/character and
- It resolves in the last line with the narrator being tricked and we are left with a feeling of hopelessness or isolation. (the notable exception to this is the 6th verse were the narrator turns the tables on the character, the preacher. still this somehow makes for even more hopelessness.)
For example, the last verse in the song:
Now the bricks lay on Grand Street
Where the neon madmen climb. (#2a)
They all fall there so perfectly,
It all seems so well timed. (#2b)
An’ here I sit so patiently (#3) (#4)
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice. (#5)
You can almost use this as a recipe and write verse after verse of your own. I have some kind of strange disease that makes me like to do stuff like that, so here goes. My very own Memphis Blues verse:
Well the barrister wrote to Ahab
Pleading for his vote
And offering to serenade
At the launching of his boatAnd the rickshaw driver said to me
Speeding to the dock
“They’ll tempt you with blue oysters
But serve you Brighton Rock.”
Oh, Mama…
Cheap Talk 