What do Steve Jobs and Chicago plumbers have in common? Apparently, they care about alphabetical order. Like the rest of the world, I have been reading Walter Isaacson's new biography of Jobs. In choosing the name Apple, Jobs says: I was on one of my fruitarian diets ... I had just come back from the …
Accessing book sales data
People often ask me about the books I have written, "how many copies have been sold?" And it surprises them to find out that I have no idea. For instance, my book Parentonomics was published initially by UNSW Press and then MIT Press before being translated into, I think, 6 other languages each with their …
Password Security and Game Theory
Over the last few days or so, I have done much fretting about this article in The Atlantic by James Fallows. The story of how Fallows' wife had her Gmail account hacked by someone who used it to try and extort money out of her friends and contacts and, to add insult to injury, deleted …
Cloudy upgrades
It is a wonder the Internet didn't just break yesterday. Apple updated both Mac OSX and iOS. Combined there was almost 1.5GB in downloads. If you have more than one machine or device, just multiply. The result was some seriously strained servers and a jittery iCloud debut. But having gone to the trouble of upgrading, …
Jobs: A Vision of American Entrepreneurship
[This is a guest post by Tim Bresnahan, the Landau Professor in Technology and the Economy at Stanford University; Ed.] Steve Jobs has died. We should remember his accomplishments and the vision of American entrepreneurship he embodied. The PC business was founded by a ragtag band of outsiders. Steve, a lotus-eating less-than-successful Atari employee, was …
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The Representative Agent in the Technological World
I live in a world of economics where we tend to doubt the power of the individual. To be sure, there are individuals who are in positions of power and who can inflict damage on the world. But in the world of business, these tend to wash out. Leaders may come and go but very …
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Is there a bias to user reviews/ratings?
Sometimes I wonder whether XKCD is just better at commentary than all of us. Today's cartoon demonstrates a great understanding of equilibrium combined with a real issue with regard to consumer incentives. It raises the puzzle that if you like, say, a hotel you have an interest in not saying so because that either reduces …
The Dismal Economics of Moneyball
Moneyball is a huge hit, which doesn't happen too often to movies featuring an economics major who's good at statistics. It tells the true story of how the Oakland A's became a competitive team despite having a payroll less than 1/3 of the Yankees. They did it by using statistical techniques pioneered by sabermetrician Bill …
What CAN'T computers do?
Not too long ago, there was a relatively long list of things machines couldn't do by themselves: play chess, read legal briefs, translate poetry, vacuum floors, drive cars, etc. But that list is getting shorter and shorter every year. The latest casualty may be writing newspaper articles. Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum at Northwestern's Intelligent Information …
Can Digital Technologies Replace Superstars?
Japan's newest pop star, Aimi Eguchi, is a digital creation. For the past couple of decades, digital technologies have been responsible for skill biased technical change, automating and replacing routine, low-skill work while augmenting the demand for more skilled workers. Bank tellers, clerks and assembly line workers were early targets of automation, while rock stars and CEOs benefited from being …
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Digitopoly 