Competition in the Digital Age
Open is better than closed. We all know that, right? If you are trying to get into a house, when the door is closed you walk right into it. That sounds bad. But if you are in the house, things are less clear. If the door is open, wind and rain and who knows what …
Continue reading "Being careful about openness as a strategy"
It is hard to predict what happens in markets and contests. But last night, I tweeted that I thought the Nobel prize for economics would be awarded for the field of practical market design. And, that is indeed what the Nobel committee announced today. I got that right and named Al Roth as one of …
In an interesting post today, Alexis Madrigal reminds everyone that the Internet was social well before MySpace, Friendster, Facebook and Twitter. He pointed out that for him, the Internet was always social with chat rooms, forums and, of course, email. He is hardly alone. That was certainly my experience. The communication elements of the Internet …
This is just a pointer to an interesting interview with Tim O'Reilly conducted by Edge. It related to the Clothesline Paradox previously discussed here by Shane Greenstein. Just a taste: But what's really interesting, when I dug into YouTube, is that it turns out that the monetary economy there is about to explode. It is …
There are lots of claims to the 'thing that the Internet was invented for.' My current nomination for winner is this post by Sir John Gurdon winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine this week. He had to wait 53 years to win a Nobel prize and to be fortunate enough that the Internet had …
[This post was originally published by HBR blogs on 8th October 2012] When the band, the xx, wanted to promote their latest album they chose a unique marketing strategy. Consistent with many artists today they released their album as an online stream before the general digital and physical release a week or so later. But how …
[This post was originally published at Forbes.com on 1st October 2012] Psst, you want to know what academics talk about these days? Not research. Not annoying students. Not even exceptional students. No, they talk about online education. And for economists like myself, they talk about it a lot. The reason is that we economist academics …
Continue reading "Online education experiments at the margin"
My new book, Information Wants to be Shared, is now officially out. I'll follow up a little later with more details regarding what it is about but if you have been a regular reader of this blog, some of the themes will be familiar. Back in December I realised that there was a common thread …
As regular readers know, I taught a strategy class to the Next 36 would-be entrepreneurs. During that process they would present their own ventures as cases. One of those ventures was Kira. Their idea was to provide a platform whereby employers would set out a series of questions and job candidates would be required to …
Continue reading "Streamlining the interview process with online videos"
One in seven people on the Earth use Facebook. Given that 1.5 billion are under the age of 12, that means one in five and a half eligible people use Facebook. Once we factor in countries that don't have or allow Facebook it gets higher. With its market cap running at $46.8 billion that means …
Digitopoly 