Competition in the Digital Age
[This Post initially appeared in HBR Online on August 22, 2017] This summer marks 50 years since the publication of John Kenneth Galbraith’s The New Industrial State and its quick rise to the top of the New York Times Best Seller list. The book was one of the rare instances where an economist was able to capture public imagination and …
Continue reading "Reflections on Galbraith’s New Industrial State, 50 years later"
I recently took over from Bruno Cassiman as the Department Editor for the Business Strategy section at Management Science. This seemed like a good opportunity to reflect on some changes being made -- that is, implementing some of the ideas in Scholarly Publishing and its Discontents -- as well as some things I have learned …
Continue reading "News from Management Science (Business Strategy)"
[co-authored with Ajay Agrawal and Avi Goldfarb; originally published on HBR.org on 26th July 2017] With the recent explosion in AI, there has been the understandable concern about its potential impact on human work. Plenty of people have tried to predict which industries and jobs will be most affected, and which skills will be most …
Paul Graham famously said: The cutoff in investors' heads is 32 ... after 32 they tend to be a little skeptical. That apparently is the consensus view on what age you want the founders to be in order to generate successful returns. What does the data say? According to a new paper by Pierre Azoulay, …
[This post appeared on HBR Online on 14th July 2017] Almost 20 years have passed since the corporate world woke up to long-term problems in computer code, which became known as Y2K. Over the previous decades, software developers had used the date 01-01-00 (January 1, 2000) as a convenient hack to make it easier to debug software. The …
In the New York Times, Luigi Zingales and Guy Rolnik are proposing to pre-emptively deal with market power issues arising from the likes of Google and Facebook by advocating for social graph portability. Rather than use price regulation or antitrust, the propose a reallocation of property rights. As they note, this has happened before: [I]n …
Here is an article I wrote forecasting what Canada might be like in 150 years. Canada +150: Energy fuels Star Trek economy William Shatner as Star Trek’s Captain James T. Kirk is depicted on a commemorative stamp issued by Canada Post in 2016. Handout/Canada PostJoshua Gans, University of Toronto Editor’s note: Canada Day 2017 marks …
Luigi Butera and John List have examined how cooperation is impacted on by uncertainty -- and not just any uncertainty but Knightian uncertainty where outcomes cannot easily be described by a probability distribution. They examine a situation where experimental subjects are contributing to a public good whose returns are uncertain and where individuals may or …
Continue reading "Economists found something surprising and you won't believe what happened next"
Co-authored with Ajay Agrawal and Avi Goldfarb [This post appeared in HBR Online on March 28, 2017] It doesn’t take a tremendous amount of training to begin a job as a cashier at McDonald’s. Even on their first day, most new cashiers are good enough. And they improve as they serve more customers. Although a …
That is a question raised by the experience of a "rogue" neuroscientist profiled in Wired today: SAM NASTASE WAS taking a break from his lab work to peruse Twitter when he saw a tweet about his manuscript. A PhD in cognitive neuroscience at Dartmouth College, Nastase had sent his research out for review at a …
Digitopoly 