At a conference in Brussels last week I made a short speech about Facebook and its poor approach to regulatory management and innovation. I refer at the end to this paper from The Hamilton Project.
Free Software without a Free Lunch or Free Beer
Economists like to say that there are no free lunches. How does that attitude apply to free software and services? It is no secret that many prominent platforms give away services, and so do many widely used open-source projects. The answer should help us understand our world. While it costs next to nothing to replicate …
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A pound of flesh for touching the progress of science
I should have gone straight to Wikipedia. Instead I put the Latin words “In Situ” into Google. The dermatologist had spelled it for me, and the Wikipedia entry appeared at the top. It said the following, “In archaeology, in situ refers to an artifact that has not been moved from its original place of deposition. …
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Can the Blockchain make teams work?
Today, in prominent economists doing the blockchain we have Al Roth. According to Bloomberg, he has signed on as an advisor to Covee; a blockchain startup creating a market for knowledge workers. Al Roth had recently said to me that his understanding was that the blockchain would be good for establishing trust but that we …
A Nobel Prize for Breaking Through Hurdles Placed by Economists
This year's Nobel Prize in Economics has been shared by Bill Nordhaus and Paul Romer for "integrating innovation and climate with economic growth." That is one way to thread the needle to link these fine recipients and I applaud the Nobel Committee for finding a way to do it. That said, there is a real …
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Selling Predictions on the Blockchain
Numerai is a blockchain startup. with a cryptocurrency boldly named Numeraire. They have just proposed a marketplace for predictions called Erasure. The premise is that there are lots of people out there with some ability -- it may be divine or it may be that they have data and a good statistical model -- to …
Independence is no disruption solution
One of the themes in The Disruption Dilemma, is that when a firm faces disruption, it is unlikely that the Clay Christensen promoted solution of setting up an independent business unit to compete with startups and itself in that new space will work. There are many reasons for this including, most importantly, that the last …
The Technology Tel
Most technology nerds know “tel” as a prefix meaning “transmission over a distance,” as in telecommunications, television, or telemarketing. Most are unfamiliar with an altogether different meaning as found in the phrase “technology tel,” which is the modern and digital equivalent to an archaeologist's tel. Archaeologists define tel as a mound created by many generations …
MIT Sloan Management Review Strategy Forum is now live
At Chicago Booth, there is a panel of famous economists who are posed various economics forecasting and policy questions and you can see which way the economic winds are blowing. The IGM Panel has been running successfully for a few years now. Tim Simcoe who had worked at the Council of Economic Advisors had noted …
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Buterin on blockchain transaction fee economics
Vitalik Buterin posted a set of slides from a recent talk he apparently gave on "Transaction Cost Economics." I didn't see the talk but inferred some interesting take-a-ways from the slides that were worth noting. When a transaction is recorded on a blockchain, someone needs to 'process' it. That is done in a decentralised fashion …
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Digitopoly 