Related to the discussion of Moneyball, the Baseball Prospectus considers the role of the Winner’s Curse on bidding on talent. The curse is a side effect when bidding on something whose true value will not be known until after the auction; such as baseball players and oil leases; but the bidders have some information that [...]
Consider this: The Oakland A’s, with a payroll of around 40 million, win as many or more games than the New York Yankees, whose payroll is over three times as large. Why did this happen? Billy Beane, the A’s general manager, has discovered three things: Bill James, arbitrage, and that the intuition of a Major [...]
The notion of path dependence — that history matters, annoys economic libertarians the same way that evolution annoys deists: it implies pure dumb luck is a factor in the order of things. It’s a knock against the Learned Hand Doctrine, market dominance may not derive from superior technology or execution alone. So while Blogistan revels [...]
PowerPoint slides on what you can do now to continue to have a career in software. UC Davis labor critic Norm Matloff was not impressed with these, but I think they are worth a look. One can’t program forever…
Over at KQED, Krasny and company were talking about media ownership on Forum, so after listening to the suits talk about how concentration of ownership is good for you and the public interest being so 1930′s, it’s good to read Aaron Swartz talking about Open Spectrum. Technology has made broadcast spectrum frequency scarcity a thing [...]
Professor Kiesling discusses how new markets created by the Internet ran afoul of existing institutions (wholesale liquor distributors) that had their niche by law. New York, Michigan and other states prohibited shipments to individual buyers from out of state wineries. The liquor wholesalers arrangements grew out of the post-Prohibition environment. Laws which were enacted out [...]
I forgot to link TNH’s wonderful post on the Taxonomy of Fraud from her weblog Making Light. Why do we see frauds? These scams take the forms they do because they’re parodies–no, a better way to put it: they’re cargo-cult effigies–of the deals the ruling class cut for themselves. If you’re an insider, if you [...]
Meanwhile, Lynne reports that California Governor Grey Davis wasn’t in any mood to talk auction theory and electricity markets a few days ago. Sigh, I don’t trust Davis any further than one of the sacks of money he gets from the prison guards, but he’s a known quantity.
Over at W6 Daily, Phillip responds to my links from yesterday. And no, there’s nothing funny in the break room coffee at Apple, aside from it being undrinkable. Nutter v. Nutter I compared Rall and Lileks because I thought both theories were silly. Serial killing isn’t Al Quida’s MO, they go for the mass murder [...]
I enjoyed this wonderfuly snarky econoblog, which doesn’t have a by-line, but appears to be written by someone in the UK. Update Victor at Fourstones IDs the writer as Daniel Davies, an economics PhD in the UK. Thanks! On the West Coast Docks Lockout: Consider for the moment, the dockworkers of the ILWU, who were [...]
[ via J. Bradford Delong ] Folks will quibble about the Nobel Prize in Economics, awarded by the Central Bank of Sweden, not being a real Nobel. But the 1999 winner, Robert Mundell, appeared on Letterman to let us know how it improved his life: Any meaningless crap I say, the next day it’s in [...]
[ via CamWorld ] Stephen Den Beste talks about how CDMA won, and why Europeans may end up leaving their GSM phones. Aside I mentioned a couple of weeks back that I bought the Danger Sidekick handset from T-Mobile. I took it back and canceled the contract. T-Mobile, I should note, was professional, and honored [...]
[ via laughingMeme via DavosNewbies ] A diagram, large, of the interrelationships between the entites and players in the current round of financial miscounduct. You can get it on a tshirt too.
[ via The Knowledge Problem ] Jane Galt discusses the spam problem in the context of the Coase Theorem, and finds: In short, there isnÃt (gasp) a market based solution [to spam], and short of a technological breakthrough that either significantly lowers transaction costs, or improves filtering to the point where spammers wonÃt bother, there [...]
On kuro5hin, they’re discussing Iain M. Bank’s Culture novels, and the distant-future post-scarcity utopia in those books. Iain’s novels will defnitely come up in the “Socialists in Kilts” panel at WorldCon.