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Category Archives: Economics
Things that cost more than space exploration
Pop Quiz: What do presidential libraries, advertisements for prescription drugs, and pennies (yes, pennies!) have in common? They are all things that cost more than space exploration! (Hat tip: Tyler Cowen.)
Vampiric Medical Technology
Originally posted on Economics of the Undead:
Guest Post by Enrique Guerra-Pujol In Chapter 12 (“Buy or Bite?”) of The Economics of the Undead, I observed how most members of the vampire race resort to coercion, compulsion, and confiscation to…
Does Amazon make a profit?
According to this economic analysis of Amazon’s business model by Benedict Evans, the answer is “not yet” … because Jeff Bezos has adopted a “closed-loop” strategy of re-investing all of Amazon’s revenues back into his company in order “to capture a larger and … Continue reading
Trolley problems
Here is the 34-word abstract of our latest paper, a work-in-progress with the title “Trolley Problems“: This paper proposes a novel and probabilistic solution to the famous “trolley problem” in moral philosophy. In short, we would solve the trolley problem … Continue reading
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Economics, Philosophy
Tagged moral philosophy, Trolley Problem
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Is Apple’s iCloud a defective product?
As a threshold matter, we would first have to determine whether Apple’s iCloud digital storage system is a “product” or a “service.” For the record, the answer to this key question is not obvious to us. Neither is it obvious to us whether this threshold issue poses a matter of … Continue reading
“When should you show up to a party?”
That is the key question posed in this fun essay by Walt Hickey, who now writes for FiveThirtyEight and who graduated from the College of William and Mary with a degree in applied mathematics. Here is an excerpt from Mr Hickey’s analysis: Nobody wants … Continue reading
The economics of parking
Are there too few parking spaces in your city or campus … or too many? Professors Mikhail Chester, Arpad Horvath, and Samer Madanat try to calculate the social costs of parking in their six-page report “Parking Infrastructure and the Environment” published in 2011. … Continue reading
Earth at night
What does this beautiful night map tell us about the relationship between population density and prosperity? Image courtesy of NASA Earth Observatory.
Reverse auction (Super Bowl edition)
Another day, another potentially creative use of an auction mechanism. According to this report in the Wall Street Journal, the NFL has reportedly requested its top three choices for the 2015 Super Bowl Halftime Show — Rihanna, Katy Perry, and Coldplay (Cold…who?) — to pay the … Continue reading
Is the Coase theorem unfalsifiable?
Our recent discussions with Glen Whitman about slavery, Haitian zombies, and the Coase Theorem has led us to think deeper about the relation between the Coase Theorem and other “legal failures.” (We consider the institution of slavery a paradigm case of … Continue reading
prior probability 