[A later, edited version of this appeared in the Wall Street Journal, 26 October 2016 under the title "Newspapers are social media"] Digitization exposes weak links. Then it breaks them. So much so that it makes you wonder what people were thinking in the first place. And, according to Harvard Business School professor, Bharat Anand in …
Wikipedia and Political Discourse: The New Hope?
Rob Gebelhoff of the Washington Post wrote an awesome piece about the latest Wikipedia research to come from Feng Zhu, Yuan (Grace) Gu, and yours truly. The piece by Gebelhoff is called "Science Shows Wikipedia is the Best Part of the Internet." It refers to our research, Ideological Segregation Among Online Collaborators: Evidence from Wikipedia. A …
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Messiness and automation
Tim Harford is the finest expositor of economic ideas today. That is a view I have held for a long time. While his first few books stayed within the economic view of puzzles his last two have moved beyond that tradition. Adapt looked at how failure breeds innovation. And now he has produced Messy a …
Neither Uber nor Lyft believe sharing is the future
... at least for cars. Uber is well-known for having pushed autonomous vehicles. And when it first floated the idea, somewhat bemused onlookers wondered how this fit with their short-term goals of attracting drivers. But when Uber set up a major R&D facility in Pittsburgh -- gutting Carnegie Mellon's computer science department -- it seemed …
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Teaching about data carrier economics? A few cases to help.
Do you teach Internet economics? Do you teach Internet strategy to business students? Looking for cases to expose students to the latest issues in data markets? This post include some quick (and shameless) publicity for a few cases you might find useful. One is about the fight between Netflix and broadband ISPs. Another is about …
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Reading and the Demand for Books
Why do people buy books? If this were Family Feud, survey says: to be read. But in the real world, I have never found that convincing. To be sure, books get read but if you consider the life of a book, most of the time it is sitting on a shelf. Moreover, it is rarely …
Big Data and the Entertainment Industry
It has been hard to find good books that deal with the digital economy -- especially in terms of microeconomics and strategy. The classic -- Information Rules -- is now almost two decades old. It holds up remarkably well but there is some embarrassment in still recommending it to students. With their new book -- …
Ten Open Questions for the Techno-Optimist
From what I can gather from several recent articles, many serious pundits have arguments with the views of ‘techno-optimists.’ A techno-optimist appears to be somebody who has blind faith in the power of technology to cure all ills, and particularly, to create economic growth. (See e.g., here, here, here, here, or here, and there are many more...) …
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On and off the grid – with digitally literate teenagers
It is not as if my wife and I intentionally seek to go off the grid. Rather, we possess a taste for mountains, National Parks, and the geologic oddities of the western US. As it happens, these type of locations tend to lack full support for the modern Internet. These locations also drive my teenage children …
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Why Elon Musk's new strategy makes sense
[This post was originally published on HBR Blogs on 25 July 2016] Last week Elon Musk released the second installment of Tesla’s Master Plan. The first installment had been written in 2006. It outlined Tesla’s automotive strategy and it has been pretty much followed to the letter. The second installment moves Tesla beyond the traditional …
Digitopoly 