My PhD advisor turns 65 today and here, at Stanford, we are having a conference in his honor. I made some remarks that I thought I'd post here. I am here to talk about Paul's contributions to applied theory. While Susan and Yeon-Koo have talked about theoretical contributions that so many in this room associate with Paul, …
Blogging Citation Norms
[Note: This post is 'wonkish,' a word which here means you may have to think harder than normal while reading it.] One thing I learned at the Kauffman Economic Bloggers Forum last week is that there is angst among the professional (i.e., non-academic) bloggers about citation and re-stating the arguments of other bloggers. It was …
Future of Blogging
Last week I attended the annual Kauffman Foundation Economics and Financial Weblogging Forum in Kansas City. It was the first time I had met so many of those bloggers that I read daily. I learned that the non-academic bloggers are young, very young. One of them is just out of high school! They are also …
Who owns Wikipedia?
Wikipedia has as one of its defining characteristics, its openness. Anyone can edit it. Anyone can reverse someone else's edits. And that process has led to the encyclopaedic resource we have today. How Wikipedia works is still a bit of a mystery. But what appears to be the case is that a core group of volunteers …
Why are there no good toilet finding apps?
Five years ago, when watching Steve Jobs introduce the concept of apps on the iPhone, I had an idea. It was to build an app that would allow you to find the nearest public toilet with the push of a button. I actually investigated doing this in Australia. The full story is here but the …
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Foolish Research
Today is April Fools Day although it is hard to miss it on the Internet. As this is a blog devoted to the more dispassionate investigation of the digital economy, I thought it would be appropriate to write a little today about several pieces of research that have been conducted by economists in recent years …
Will free MOOCs destroy Higher Education?
MIT Strategy professor Michael Cusumano published a lengthy opinion piece where he argued that free online courses may have much higher costs and consequences than the socially minded people promoting them intended. I worry, however, based on the history of free products and services available on the Internet and their impact on the software products business …
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Will the Internet Destroy the News Media? Video
I gave a seminar earlier this month at the iSchool at Berkeley. It was on my research with Susan Athey and Emilio Calvano into the future of the news media. Being an iSchool, they placed the entire video (90 minutes) on YouTube.
Reselling eBooks doesn't pass the sniff test
There is renewed interest in the idea of being able to re-sell eBooks and other digital content. First, Amazon and Apple have both entered the patent fray with exchange ideas that allow electronic content to be traded in much the same way that they can be traded as physical content. Second, the US Supreme Court …
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Deconstructing Google's Trust Problem
Right after it announced the execution of Google Reader, Google released a new product -- really a service -- called Google Keep. It basically is an Evernote, note keeping app on the Google ecosystem. This prompted many bloggers including The Atlantic's James Fallows and Ezra Klein to announce their reluctance to invest in using products …
Digitopoly 