Last week, we held the first fully fledged conference on the Economics of Artificial Intelligence here in Toronto. If you take a look here you can see the agenda and papers. It was a good crowd. We also have videos of all the talks and discussions from the conference including from some of the pioneers …
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In the wake of Hurricane Irma this weekend, Tesla pushed out a software upgrade to owners of Tesla 60kWh versions to give them the range of their 75kWh. Just like when pilots say they will "make up time in the air," commentators said: "well isn't that interesting." It seems like all Tesla's have the same …
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 …
[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 …
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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 …
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[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 …
Digitopoly 