That was the topic of a panel I was involved in at the Chicago Booth Annual Antitrust Conference last week. One thing you get from a Chicago panel is a diverse range of opinions. The panel was motivated by an article in the Yale Law Journal by Lina Khan written when she was a student …
Can AI make you happier with clothes?
There is a great scene in A Series of Unfortunate Events (the Lemony Snicket books and now Netflix series) where a couple live in a fashionable penthouse suite but the elevator in the building is off limits because elevators are presently ‘out.’ So everyone, happily or not, has to ascend and descend many flights of …
A Simple Tool to Start Making Decisions with the Help of AI
(by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb); originally published in HBR Online 17 April 2018. There is no shortage of hot takes regarding the significant impact that artificial intelligence (AI) is going to have on business in the near future. Much less has been written about how, exactly, companies should get started with it. In …
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Prediction Machines
My book with Ajay Agrawal and Avi Goldfarb is out now. It is called Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. We have written some pieces that provide little excursions into the book. "A Simple Tool to Start Making Decisions with AI," HBR Online, 17 April 2018. "Make sure AI is right for your business …
2017 Digital Year in Review
It is time for the annual review of the past year in digital economics. As in prior years, this review will resemble an awards ceremony. And there are so many events deserving of recognition -- hackers at Equifax, Russian ads at Facebook, #metoo on Twitter, an implosion at Uber, and a bubble at Bitcoin, to …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Is social graph portability workable?
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 …
Digitopoly 