One thing that intrigues me are 'grass roots' movements to sanction behaviour. I'm presenting a paper about this in scholarly publishing at the forthcoming American Economic Association meetings. However, here I wanted to talk about a skirmish that happened over the last few days in the app economy. A couple of weeks ago, a small …
Do disruptive technologies really overturn market leadership?
While "disruption" is a word often abused and certainly given a virtue that it does not seem to deserve, the phrase "disruptive technologies" that started it all was actually more precise. Clay Christensen wrote that: Generally, disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler …
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Time for a little Bitcoin discussion
If I had a Bitcoin for every time a journalist has called in the last couple of months wanting to ask me about Bitcoin, I'd be very rich today and rich with variance tomorrow. The reason they come a-calling is because of this paper I wrote with Hanna Halaburda that discusses digital currencies while avoiding …
Aaugh rather than Arragh: Windows Piracy
Bill Gates once famously argued that if people are going to pirate software, he'd rather them pirate Microsoft's. This is hardly surprising in that Microsoft products run on the majority of PCs in China (traditionally a poster-child for software piracy) and, by design or accident, has meant that Microsoft is a leader there with its …
Top Dozen Tech Events of 2013
It is time to look back, and give some awards for the best events in information and communications technology. And what a year it was -- with Snowden, Healthcare IT, the Twitter IPO, and plenty of other events deserving both recognition and sarcastic observation. Just like last year, there are four criteria for winning. The winner …
What is an economic means of assigning credit?
In a recent post at VoxEU (based on a recent working paper entitled "Willful Blindness") Stan Liebowitz argues that the assignment of credit by economics departments to academic researchers is "uneconomic." By this he means that in co-authored papers the credit shares sum to more than 1. Instead, in a survey of economics department chairs he finds that …
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Shy Slices: How online ordering facilitates a long tail in pizza types
As part of a potential new series on The Enlightened Manager, Slate has published an article of mine on the effect moving to online ordering had on pizza orders. One great thing about the Internet, of course, is that the crowd can identify things I had trouble with. For instance, in writing the article I …
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Can you move away from freemium?
One of the popular forms of price discrimination for software services/platforms these days is freemium. This is where there is a free product offered alongside a premium product. For online storage and backup, this has been a familiar strategy used by start-ups such as a Dropbox but also established firms such as Google, Microsoft and …
A new type of scholarly journal boycott
We have seen numerous boycott calls with regard to academic publishers but they have generally been about market power and its exploitation. Today, a more serious boycott call was launched with the claim that some publications are harming science itself -- a potentially more serious charge. The call comes from this year's medicine Nobel prize …
Some simple economics of drone delivery
My knowledge of drones being used for the delivery of small packages is limited to the Amazon inspired puffery that has flooded the Internet this morning. From my reading, people think it is (a) cool and (b) something that may be the undoing of Amazon competitively. I’ll agree with (a) but that is true of …
Digitopoly 