Recently, the satirical newspaper The Onion captured — and not for the first time — just what I wanted to write about in this post with its article "'The Economist' to Halt Production for Month to Let Readers Catch Up." Still, though, I think the five-issue-high pile of The Economist on my desk could tell us much about what …
Continue reading "In digital media, the commercial value of the pile"
At the WWDC Apple announced its iCloud suite of apps. One of them was ‘iTunes in the Cloud.’ This was a free service that allowed consumers who had purchased music through iTunes to download that music and sync in across multiple devices (including the iPhone, iPad and both Macs and PCs). This provided ease of …
Continue reading "Apple's 'Buy Your Way Out of Piracy' Office"
Harry Truman famously begged for a one-handed economist. Why? He was sick of his economic advisers saying "on the other hand." Charles Schultz expressed similar frustration here. The idea that economists hedge their bets or disagree constantly with one another is a feature of the discipline. We see it today over issues such as the deficit and health …
The title of this post surely seems somewhat strange. Surely any self-respecting business should be in the interest of making as much profit as possible, and the temptation might be to extract as much as you can from each customer interaction. But we know that such views can be too short-term. In many situations, while …
If the last big revolution was replacing muscle power with machines, the next one is automating and augmenting more mental tasks. Henry Ford and compatriots replaced the horse, now Google is working to replace the driver. According to John Markoff in the New York Times, their self-driving cars have now logged over 140,000 miles on California …
Continue reading "Google is putting the "auto" into automobile"
Newspapers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are currently experimenting with paywalls that prevent non-paying customers from accessing some content. But what if all customers could access the same content, but the "economy" (i.e. free) visitors saw ads and other clutter while the "business class" customers got a cleaner experience? Would that be a viable model? …
Back in 2000, Stephen King tried something new in selling a novel, The Plant. He decided to offer it exclusively online — in digital format — knowing that there was effectively no protection against copying. Of course, King was well aware that selfishness may be against him and so decided to offer his book in installments. …
Continue reading "Pay what you want experiments. From Stephen King to Kickstarter"
Last year I had the pleasure of presenting a seminar at Yahoo Research. One of the things that interested me about that part of Yahoo was the fact that it had, in my field of economics, made some very significant hires from academia. In a time where some academically oriented labs had fallen aside, Yahoo …
In 1974, hundreds of thousands of Australians with a bank account in good standing received a piece of plastic in the mail: a credit card, known as a Bankcard, launched and operated by a consortium of Australian banks. In one swoop, a payment instrument that had been previously available to only the wealthy in Australia (through …
Al Roth has been doing fascinating work designing matching markets. These include the markets for matching kidney donors and recipients, medical residents to programs, and assigning students to schools. In these markets, small changes in the "rules of the game" can lead to big efficiency gains, and it's not always obvious how to best make those …
