Competition in the Digital Age
It is time to look back at digital technology in 2025 and make light of it. This review will be arranged much like the Oscars, with awards in various categories. Just as in past years, there are three criteria for the dozen awards this year:• The award must involve digital technology, such as viral videos …
What can a nineteenth-century economist teach a twenty-first-century Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at one of the largest technology firms? More to the point, why is Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, quoting William Stanley Jevons? Jevons was a dominant figure in economic thought in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century, but not today. His …
Continue reading "Artificial Intelligence and the Jevons Paradox"
Epiphany plays an outsized role in the reductionist two-step model of invention. Step one is when an idea pops into an inventor’s head, and step two is when the invention spreads in an economy over time. This model is misleading in numerous ways that would take a book to enumerate. Today’s column focuses on step …
Continue reading "Spillovers, Bottlenecks, and More Invention After Invention"
A prototype is a product or service's early sample, model, or release. It is built to test a concept or process and serves as a tangible representation of an idea. Some prototypes are primarily commercial, while others are scientific. The advent of digitization has significantly revolutionized the prototyping process over several decades in both commercial …
The Worlds I See. Curiosity, Exploration, and the Discovery at the Dawn of AI—Fei-Fei Li (New York, NY, USA: Flatiron Books, 2023, 322 pp.) Fei-Fei Li is known for leading the development of ImageNet, which helped catalyze machine-learning approaches to vision recognition, and for being an essential voice shaping the science behind Artificial Intelligence (AI) …
Continue reading "A Review of Fei-Fei Li’s book, The Worlds I see."
It is time to review the year in digital technology. Oh, what fun! As with prior reviews, we will arrange this review like an award ceremony. There are three criteria for an award: It must involve digital technology. The key event must have taken place this year, 2023. And it must lend itself to sass …
WE CAN GET THEM TO CHANGE -- PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION. When I (or someone else in my household) orders something from Amazon, i get emailed a receipt. This is useful because then I can see what was ordered, whether it is the right thing or shout at someone who ordered something we already have. …
News today that my PhD Supervisor, Paul Milgrom, won the Nobel prize for economics. He won it with his PhD Supervisor, Bob Wilson. Both were long overdue for the honor. There are so many things one could say about Paul but it turned out that I said what I wanted to say back in 2013 …
I have started a new email newsletter, Plugging the Gap, that looks at economics and Covid-19. Here is today's post which overlaps with usual Digitopoly fodder. You can subscribe here. In an unprecedented move, Disney has decided to release the live-action, Mulan, (previously slated to be a big summer blockbuster) online using its Disney+ streaming …
I have been spending my quarantine absorbing research on COVID-19 -- especially economic research -- and, in the process, have written a book, Economics in the Age of COVID-19 that will be published at the end of the month by MIT Press. Here is what is interesting about the process. Clearly, this has been quick. …
Digitopoly 