Competition in the Digital Age
I don't mean to be spending time critiquing Elizabeth Warren per se, I kinda like most of her policies but this antitrust stuff is just crazy. Now, in an interview with The Verge, Warren takes aim at breaking up Apple. Yes, Apple. And in a way that it is pretty surprising. She wants to have …
Continue reading "Since when is Apple owning the App Store a problem?"
Elizabeth Warren wants to break up Facebook, Amazon and Google. Why? In the 1990s, Microsoft — the tech giant of its time — was trying to parlay its dominance in computer operating systems into dominance in the new area of web browsing. The federal government sued Microsoft for violating anti-monopoly laws and eventually reached a settlement. The government’s antitrust …
From its very early days, one of the main areas where blockchain enthusiasts argued there was potential for radical innovation was in the ability of the technology to house smart contracts. The Ethereum network was designed with this in mind: to be a distributed ledger with a 'Turing complete' virtual machine on top of it. …
At a conference in Brussels last week I made a short speech about Facebook and its poor approach to regulatory management and innovation. I refer at the end to this paper from The Hamilton Project.
Today, in prominent economists doing the blockchain we have Al Roth. According to Bloomberg, he has signed on as an advisor to Covee; a blockchain startup creating a market for knowledge workers. Al Roth had recently said to me that his understanding was that the blockchain would be good for establishing trust but that we …
This year's Nobel Prize in Economics has been shared by Bill Nordhaus and Paul Romer for "integrating innovation and climate with economic growth." That is one way to thread the needle to link these fine recipients and I applaud the Nobel Committee for finding a way to do it. That said, there is a real …
Continue reading "A Nobel Prize for Breaking Through Hurdles Placed by Economists"
Numerai is a blockchain startup. with a cryptocurrency boldly named Numeraire. They have just proposed a marketplace for predictions called Erasure. The premise is that there are lots of people out there with some ability -- it may be divine or it may be that they have data and a good statistical model -- to …
One of the themes in The Disruption Dilemma, is that when a firm faces disruption, it is unlikely that the Clay Christensen promoted solution of setting up an independent business unit to compete with startups and itself in that new space will work. There are many reasons for this including, most importantly, that the last …
At Chicago Booth, there is a panel of famous economists who are posed various economics forecasting and policy questions and you can see which way the economic winds are blowing. The IGM Panel has been running successfully for a few years now. Tim Simcoe who had worked at the Council of Economic Advisors had noted …
Continue reading "MIT Sloan Management Review Strategy Forum is now live"
Vitalik Buterin posted a set of slides from a recent talk he apparently gave on "Transaction Cost Economics." I didn't see the talk but inferred some interesting take-a-ways from the slides that were worth noting. When a transaction is recorded on a blockchain, someone needs to 'process' it. That is done in a decentralised fashion …
Continue reading "Buterin on blockchain transaction fee economics"
Digitopoly 