noun: the process of products shrinking in size or quantity while their prices remain the same.
Hat tip: @JoMadLong, via Twitter.
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College sports and promissory estoppel
Hey, what’s up? We are attending the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Academy of Legal Studies in Business (#SEALSB2016) in Durham, N.C. this weekend. Our favorite talk so far has been Joseph Long’s presentation on promissory estoppel and the 2015-16 Lousiville basketball season. In summary, Prof Long posed a variant of the following problem: what if a college soccer coach promises a potential star recruit the opportunity to start on the team, and the recruit then joins the team based on this promise? Now, suppose a sex scandal erupts (involving the coach but not the recruit), causing the college to cancel the team’s season. Does the recruit have a legal cause of action against the university under the doctrine of promissory estoppel? According to this common law doctrine, a promise is enforceable by law, even if made without formal consideration, when a promisor (the coach) has made a promise to a promisee (the recruit) who then relies on that promise to his subsequent detriment.
Image credit: Matthew LaMieux
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Legal prophecies
In previous papers, we have used Bayesian methods to predict litigation outcomes (“A Bayesian Model of the Litigation Game“), and we have also modeled litigation as a game of poker (“The Poker-Litigation Game“). In our latest work (“The Colonel Blotto Litigation Game“), we model litigation as a series of strategic contests or what game theorists call a Colonel Blotto game, i.e. a game of allocative strategic mismatch in which the parties must allocate scarce time resources to a finite number of contests. Although the original version of Colonel Blotto began as a game of military strategy, the strategic aspects of this game have many possible real-world applications, including litigation.
Guerra-Pujol (2016)
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Game Theory, Law
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Dewey defeats Truman …
Never mind. For the record, here is our favorite part of Mr Trump’s victory speech earlier this morning: “For those who have chosen not to support me in the past …, I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great country.”
Time to update our priors.
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Thiel, Truth, and Trump
Revised 11/7: Is Peter Thiel angling for a position in a Trump White House? Whatever his motives, we tend to agree with most of what Mr Thiel is saying, which is why we are voting Libertarian this year.
Posted in Current Affairs, Politics
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Trump’s toupee
Gawker’s Ashley Feinberg did some digging and was able to trace the origins of Donald’s Trump’s meticulous hairdo. It’s a toupee! According to Ms Feinberg, Trump’s toupee is based on “a little-known, patented hair restoration treatment [pictured below] called a ‘microcylinder intervention.'” Read her full report here.
It’s alive!
Posted in Bayesian Reasoning, Deception, Questions Rarely Asked, Science, Truth
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Ben Franklin’s daily routine
Hat tip: Belle Beth Cooper, via Lifehacker.
Posted in Culture, Economics, Questions Rarely Asked
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prior probability 