Creative Commons
Blogs I Follow
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Applied mathematics (birthday cake edition)
Is there a “right” way to cut cake?
Is Professor Christensen a sexist pig?
Harvard historian Jill Lepore has written a scathing takedown of Clayton Christensen’s unfalsifiable “disruptive innovation” theory. (Why are business school professors so taken by empty buzzwords and trendy catch phrases?) Prof. Christensen responds to Lepore’s essay in this interview. Note … Continue reading
Time-outs versus “stoppage time”
Don’t you hate the endless series of strategic time-outs in basketball and American football, which always end up breaking up the flow of the game? We do. Why can’t all sports follow the international football (soccer) model and use a … Continue reading
How Much Do Expert Witnesses Get Paid?
Originally posted on Cheap Talk:
From a story about the NCAA trial: Noll, like most of the expert witnesses here, was paid well for his testimony: $800 an hour. (James Heckman, an N.C.A.A. expert, received $2,300 per hour.) “I think…
Posted in Uncategorized
2 Comments
A modest (political) proposal?
Finally, an honest politician …
How much cheating goes on (in soccer)?
Alan Burdick, a writer for The New Yorker (one of my favorite English-language weekly magazines), summarizes some recent research in this area conducted by Chris Stride, a psychologist at the University of Sheffield: First, [Stride] had to define cheating. In soccer, all … Continue reading
World Cup auctions?
Why not use auctions or some other market mechanism to allocate the right to host such sporting events as the World Cup, the Olympics, or the Super Bowl? Or do you think FIFA’s corrupt selection methods, or the IOC’s opaque multi-stage selection process, or … Continue reading
“Beautiful Game Theory”
That is the title of this book which explores the relation between economics and football (or soccer, for sportifs in the US) and which we will be reading in the coming days … between first-stage matches, that is. “Beautiful Game Theory” was written by Ignacio … Continue reading
When beautiful models go wrong
No, not those types of models! We mean abstract, mathematical models. Celebrity economist Paul Krugman writes: Suppose you’re making a prediction — and every assertion about how the world works has to involve at least an implicit prediction of something, … Continue reading
Open-source patents?
Elon Musk — co-founder and CEO of Tesla Motors — has this to say about Tesla’s proprietary patents: When I started out with my first company, Zip2, I thought patents were a good thing and worked hard to obtain them. And maybe they were good … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Elon Musk, Innovation, Law, Property, Strategy, Tesla Motors
3 Comments
