Ken Arrow passed away at the age of 95 yesterday. There will be many who write about his many achievements. Ken won the Nobel prize in 1972 (shared with John Hicks) and was and still is the youngest person to ever win that award. This is all the more amazing since he got a late …
Snapchat chooses execution over control
As Snapchat (SNAP) nears its IPO, analysts have been pouring over its public documents. Ben Thompson found this interesting bit: Our strategy is to invest in product innovation and take risks to improve our camera platform. We do this in an effort to drive user engagement, which we can then monetize through advertising. We use …
Scholarly Publishing and its Discontents
It's 2017 and so it is high time I wrote and released another book. And so here it is. This one is about scholarly publishing and summarises the research of many people including those generously funded by a Sloan Foundation grant into the Economics of Knowledge Contribution and Diffusion. This book isn't for everyone. It …
Exit, Tweets and Loyalty
That is the title of a new paper by Avi Goldfarb, Mara Lederman and myself. In 1970, Albert Hirschman wrote a widely read book, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, whereby he noted that economists relied solely on a particular mechanism -- exit -- to think about how organisations that aren't performing well are disciplined. Don't like …
10 Years Ago Today
It is 10 years ago today that the most significant consumer technological innovation, possibly of the last 50 years, was introduced. Here is Steve Jobs introducing it: If you have never seen it, you should watch. The original iPhone is a shadow of its counter-parts today. But the design is essentially the same. All mobile …
Top Posts of 2016
As is traditional, here are the Top Posts of 2016 at Digitopoly The Simple Economics of Machine Intelligence The Entrepreneurship/Inequality Myth Adult colouring books reminds us that innovation lies outside economics Top Ten Open Questions for the Techno-Optimist What will it take to disrupt Facebook? Neither Uber nor Lyft believe that sharing is the future …
What to Learn from US Govt Strategy on AI
[This post was co-authored with Ajay Agrawal and Avi Goldfarb. A shorter version was published in HBR Online on 21st December 2016. Also, the post does not review a new White House paper on AI and its impact released on 20th December 2016, that cites some posts on this blog.] On October 12, 2016, President …
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AI and Competition Policy
I participated at an interesting panel at an antitrust conference in Brussels today. I was about big data and whether it will be a problem for competition policy. This is something that has been widely discussed but there is little resolution on the issue. When it comes to the potential problems that arise from big …
Falling Costs: Two Non-Technical Papers
This is just a pointer to two new (non-technical) papers of mine that look at the implications of various falling costs associated with new technologies. The first is a much longer version of the blog post earlier this week on the simple economics of artificial intelligence. "Managing the Machines" co-authored with Ajay Agrawal and Avi …
Tesla's use restrictions for autonomous driving
At a conference last week on the sharing economy (video here), an audience member asked me about the following clause in Tesla's autonomous driving agreement: Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible …
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