prior probability

That is the name of this fascinating guessing game that I stumbled upon as I was reading “The Biggest Bluff” by Maria Konnikova. This game was invented in the early 2000s by two poker players, Antonio Esfandiari and Phil Laak. According to poker legend, they spontaneously decided to spice things up during the grind of a high-stakes poker tournament in Europe by asking a third party (fellow poker player Johnny Lodden, pictured below top left) a random question, such as “How old is Clint Eastwood?” Laak and Esfandiari then agreed to bet on what they thought Lodden’s answer would be. To keep the game honest, I imagine that Laak and Esfandari asked Lodden to write down his answer ahead of time. Either way, what I find so fascinating about this game is that the true answer to the original question doesn’t matter; the only thing that matters is what Laak and Esfandari think Lodden’s answer will be. In fact, it does not matter what the questions are either–the crazier the question the better! More details here.

Via Tumblr (circa 2014, emphasis added): “Last Man … is a game of deliberate media/knowledge avoidance, invented by … Kyle Whelliston. Its full name is ‘Last Man in America to Know Who Won the Super Bowl‘.” The official rules of this crazy game are below the fold:

To commemorate Saint Valentine’s Day, I am reposting my Adam Smith’s Lost Loves blog post (via AdamSmithWorks) as well as my full-length paper on Adam Smith in Love (via Econ Journal Watch). As an aside, according to this history of Valentine’s Day, it was Chaucer who was the first to record this occasion as a day of romantic celebration, writing in his 1375 poem Parliament of Foules: “For this was sent on Seynt Valentyne’s day/Whan every foul cometh ther to choose his mate.” So, perhaps it is not too far-fetched to imagine Adam Smith — who, alas, never married — asking someone, perhaps the Lady of Fife or Lady Francis or Madame Nicol, Will you be my Valentine?

With Saint Valentine’s Day around the corner — and Black History Month in full swing — today I want to take us back to 1978 to share this music video of “Is this love“. FYI: Bob Marley was born in Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica in the month of February — Feb. 6, 1945, to be precise!

Via Kottke, the video below shows how the “warp jump” special effect in the Star Trek universe has changed over the years, beginning with Star Trek: The Movie in 1979. (In case you’re wondering, there were no warp-speed special effects in the original Star Trek series.) You’re welcome!

Also, via Reddit, see here for maps of British, German, Japanese, and North American sportswear brands. File under: Big, Bad Nike versus the World.

I have blogged about Rosa Parks before (see here and here, for example), but I did not know that the actual city bus in which she was arrested on December 1, 1955 for refusing to give up her seat to a white man–a brave act of defiance that ended up changing the entire world–still exists. It was restored and brought back to life by the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, going from a discarded relic in a lonesome Alabama field (see below) to one of the most popular artifacts in that museum’s collection. Via The Henry Ford (THF), more details are available here.

During the past 12 years, I have authored or co-authored a number of scholarly works exploring various aspects of markets and property rights using a “Coasean” lens. In addition to my 2011 paper on “Coase and the Constitution“, for example, which I blogged about recently, I have also explored or applied the logic of markets and property rights in the following contexts:

1. Science fiction. Another 2011 paper of mine, Clones and the Coase theorem (co-authored with my colleague and friend Orlando Martínez-García), explores Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner from a Coasean perspective.
2. Blackmail. Why not a market in secrets? Yet another 2011 paper, this one titled The problem of blackmail: a critique of Coase, “out-Coases” Coase (so to speak) and explains why blackmail is a reciprocal problem.
3. The prisoner’s dilemma. My 2014 essay on the famous “prisoner’s dilemma” (also co-authored with Martínez-García) asks, What would happen if the prisoners in this dilemma were allowed to talk and bargain with each other? Would they strike a Coasean bargain?
4. Vampires. Another 2014 essay of mine, Buy or bite?, which found its way into The Economics of the Undead, discusses the possibility of contracts between humans and vampires for the purchase and sale of blood.
5. The trolley problem. Yet another 2014 paper, Trolley Problems, proposes a market solution to both versions of the famous “trolley problem” in moral philosophy: why not conduct an auction from behind a veil of ignorance?
6. Literary fan art. My 2019 NYU paper Of Coase and copyrights explains why copyright infringement — and, more generally, disputes between “creators” and mere “copiers” — is a reciprocal problem and defends literary fan art as fair use.
7. Lockdowns. My work-in-progress Lockdowns as takings, which I began writing in 2020 and significantly revised in 2021, explains why workers have a property right to their labor and why stay-at-home orders constitute a government taking of such labor rights.
8. Illegal and immoral promises. My most recent work, Breaking bad promises (forthcoming), explores the problem of illegal and immoral agreements.
9. Conspiracy theories. My other forthcoming work, The Leibniz Conspiracy, proposes a retrodiction market to allow people to bet on their favorite conspiracy theories.

Academic trolling, or flashes of insight? Either way, I will leave it up to my loyal readers to decide which of these scholarly works are totally loony and which are perfectly lucid.