I was recently asked what books I thought any MBA must read. I figured I would share my list 5 books with everyone. OK 12 books. It's hard to pair it down. From Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan, The Org: The Underlying Logic of the Office is a great exposition of how organisations really operate. …
The Safety Cost Savings for Autonomous Vehicles are Way Understated
For as long as I have been hearing about autonomous vehicles, I have been reading about potential lives saved if humans were no longer driving. 37,000 Americans died in car crashes last year and, in 2013, according to the World Health Organization, 1.25 million people died. These numbers seem high but given the amount of …
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Netflix and Old Style TV
[This article was initially published in HBR Online on 19th October, 2017] Netflix hit the industry with some bombshell moves this month. First, it announced that it plans to spend $8 billion on original content next year (including on 80 new movies). This is far more than any other online player. Obviously, this is great …
How AI Could Change Amazon: A thought experiment
[This post originally appeared in HBR online on 3rd October, 2017] by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb How will AI change strategy? That’s the single most common question the three of us are asked from corporate executives, and it’s not trivial to answer. AI is fundamentally a prediction technology. As advances in AI make …
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Vox gets QWERTY wrong
This video produced by Vox.com on why we have QWERTY-standard keyboards was interesting but it didn't actually answer the question as to why QWERTY was over-rated. It's claim is that it was the result of collusion from typewriter manufacturers and how typing was taught. Sure, that explains how it started, but it doesn't explain why …
A few words on Twitter’s 280 experiment
Twitter have decided to run an experiment. They are giving random users twice the character limit -- 280 rather than 140 characters. Their motivation was their observation that in Japanese, Korean and Chinese 140 characters conveys alot more information and so people tend to tweet more often. Here is their full statement. The instructive graph …
Kahneman on AI versus Humans
At our AI conference last week, Nobel Laureate, Danny Kahneman, was commenting on a paper by Colin Camerer but ended up spending much of his time talking about his view as to whether AI (or robots) would replace humans. He had definite opinions on the subject. Here is a video of his remarks:
Videos from the Economics of AI Conference
Last week, we held the first fully fledged conference on the Economics of Artificial Intelligence here in Toronto. If you take a look here you can see the agenda and papers. It was a good crowd. We also have videos of all the talks and discussions from the conference including from some of the pioneers …
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Are Teslas damaged goods?
In the wake of Hurricane Irma this weekend, Tesla pushed out a software upgrade to owners of Tesla 60kWh versions to give them the range of their 75kWh. Just like when pilots say they will "make up time in the air," commentators said: "well isn't that interesting." It seems like all Tesla's have the same …
EJMR needs to end
Over a week ago, Justin Wolfers wrote in the New York Times about new research by Alice Wu (a Berkeley undergraduate student with skills in machine learning). Her paper examined discussions on the website Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR) and found that women who were discussed on the site were more likely to have personal …
Digitopoly 