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Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Yahoo’s Self-Inflicted Winner’s Curse

Posted in Auctions, Internet, Microeconomics, Technology, tagged , , on April 15, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

Over at Managerial Econ, Luke Froeb highlights a nice example of the winner’s curse. Like Google, Yahoo uses automated auctions to sell ads. One wrinkle is that some advertisers prefer to pay for impressions, some prefer to pay for clicks, and some prefer to pay only for resulting sales. Yahoo thus needs some mechanism to [...]

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The Rising Risk of Antibiotic Resistance

Posted in Microeconomics, Regulation, Technology, tagged , , on April 3, 2011 | 9 Comments »

Scary theme of the week? Rising antibiotic resistance. Megan McArdle highlighted this challenge in her presentation at the Kauffman bloggers event on Friday; if you have a moment, check out her chart at the 2:00 mark, showing that resistance to new antibiotics has been developing faster and faster. You’ll hear more about resistance later in [...]

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Curation versus Search

Posted in Internet, Technology, tagged , , , on January 12, 2011 | 1 Comment »

I love Twitter (you can find me at @dmarron). Indeed, I spend much more time perusing my Twitter feed than I do on Facebook. But it’s not because I care about Kanye West’s latest weirdness (I followed him for about eight hours) or what Katy Perry had for lunch. No, the reason I love Twitter is that [...]

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Google More Popular Than Wikipedia … in 1900

Posted in Internet, Technology, tagged , , on December 18, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Google unveiled a new toy yesterday. The Books Ngram Viewer lets users see how often words and phrases were used in books from 1500 to 2008. Other bloggers have already run some fun economics comparisons. Barry Ritholz, for example, has does inflation vs. deflation, Main Street vs. Wall Street, and Gold vs. Oil. In the [...]

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Thanksgiving Reading

Posted in Business, Microeconomics, Nature, Politics, Technology, tagged , , , , on November 24, 2010 | Leave a Comment »

So many fascinating economic issues, so little time to blog. Here are some of the fun items that I would have discussed in recent days if I had infinite time: How OpenTable uses its market power. Over at Incanto, Mark Pastore describes how OpenTable uses its dominant position in online restaurant reservations to get as much [...]

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No, the Web Isn’t Dead (Yet)

Posted in Internet, Technology, tagged , on August 23, 2010 | 2 Comments »

Wired’s cover story this month, “The Web is Dead,” features the following chart showing the portion of internet traffic in different uses: Over the past few years, peer-to-peer services and video have gobbled up an increasing share of traffic, while the “traditional” web — you know, surfing from site to site, reading your favorite blog [...]

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The Weird Economics of Cellular Calling Plans

Posted in Technology, tagged , , on November 15, 2009 | 2 Comments »

Yesterday’s New York Times has an amusing article about the complexities of cell phone pricing (ht: Carolyn): HERE’S a consolation prize to the millions who recoil in bafflement from cellphone companies’ labyrinthine price plans, with their ever more intricate arrays of minutes, messages and megabytes: Economists don’t understand them, either. “The whole pricing thing is [...]

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Netflix Avoids the Sunk Cost Fallacy

Posted in Business, Internet, Technology, tagged , , on September 28, 2009 | 5 Comments »

The highlight of this month’s Wired magazine is a profile of Netflix and its CEO, Reed Hastings. The theme is Netflix’s strategy to thrive even as their business model changes (e.g., as on-line streaming replaces DVDs by mail). The opening paragraphs document an impressive willingness to change course: It had taken the better part of [...]

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Netflix Boosts Prize Economics

Posted in Business, Internet, Teaching, Technology, tagged , on September 22, 2009 | 1 Comment »

By at least one metric – the number of people who have mentioned it to me – my brief post about Netflix appears to be my most popular one so far. The post linked to a remarkable slide deck about the corporate culture that Netflix has embraced in its quest for excellence. Most memorable line: [...]

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Insight on Google and Unemployment

Posted in Data, Macroeconomics, Technology, tagged , , , on September 14, 2009 | 2 Comments »

In a series of posts (here, here, and here), I have expressed concern that Google directs its users to what I think is the “wrong” measure of unemployment. For example, if you search for “unemployment rate United States” today, it will tell you that the U.S. unemployment rate in August was 9.6%, when the actual [...]

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