Category: Technology

The Attention Deficit Society

One highlight of the Milken Global Conference was an excellent panel discussion of how new communication technologies are changing the way that people think and interact.

Moderated by the amusing Dennis Kneale of Fox Business, the panelists were:

Nicholas Carr, Author, “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”

Cathy Davidson, Ruth F. DeVarney Professor of English and John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Duke University

Clifford Nass, Thomas M. Storke Professor, Stanford University

Sherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, MIT

I am proud to say that I sat through the entire panel without checking my iPhone or iPad. But it was a struggle.

The full panel is a bit more than an hour. If you are short on time, you may still enjoy the first few minutes of movie clips illustrating some perils of modern technology. Here’s the link again.

Why Free Is a Bad Price

Marco Arment is the brains behind one of my favorite apps. Instapaper allows you to store articles off the Web for later reading; very useful, for example, when I am surfing and come across an article I want to share with my students or use in a future blog post. And the editor of Instapaper periodically shares excellent reads that I might otherwise miss.

Instapaper is currently available for both the iPhone and the iPad for $4.99. As Marco discusses in his blog, however, the iPhone version has sometimes been available for free (but with ads).

Based on his pricing experiments, Marco has decided that free is a bad model. In part that’s because ads provide weak revenues, and it’s expensive to support two versions of the app. In part it’s because the free app cannibalizes sales from the paid version.

But that’s not all. Another problem is that the free version attracts “undesirable customers”:

Instapaper Free always had worse reviews in iTunes than the paid app. Part of this is that the paid app was better, of course, but a lot of the Free reviews were completely unreasonable.

Only people who buy the paid app — and therefore have no problem paying $5 for an app — can post reviews for it. That filters out a lot of the sorts of customers who will leave unreasonable, incomprehensible, or inflammatory reviews. (It also filters out many people likely to need a lot of support.)

I don’t need every customer. I’m primarily in the business of selling a product for money. How much effort do I really want to devote to satisfying people who are unable or extremely unlikely to pay for anything.

Free is a risky price because it allows people to get something without really thinking about whether they want it. That’s why health insurers insist you pay at least $5 to see your doc or get a prescription.  And it’s why DC’s nickel bag tax has been so effective in cutting use of plastic bags.

Kudos to Marco for sharing his results and calling on others to run similar experiments. But I won’t be one of them. Free continues to be the right price here in the blogosphere.

Yahoo’s Self-Inflicted Winner’s Curse

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 put these different payment approaches on a comparable footing:

To choose the highest-valued bidder, Yahoo develops predictors of how many clicks and sales result from each impression. For example, if one click occurs for every ten impressions, an advertiser would have to bid more than 10 times as high for a click as for an impression in order to win the auction.

Yahoo was very proud of its predictors, but was puzzled that they systematically over-predicted the actual number of clicks or sales after the auctions closed.

This is the winner’s curse in action. As auction guru (and Yahoo VP) Preston McAfee explains in the paper Luke cites:

In a standard auction context, the winner’s curse states that the bidder who over-estimates the value of an item is more likely to win the bidding, and thus that the winner will typically be a bidder who over-estimated the value of the item, even if every bidder estimates in an unbiased fashion. The winner’s curse arises because the auction selects in a biased manner, favoring high estimates. In the advertising setting, however, it is not the bidders who are over-estimating the value. Instead, the auction will tend to favor the bidder whose click probability is overestimated, even if the click probability was estimated in an unbiased fashion.

McAfee then goes on to explain how Yahoo overcame this self-inflicted winner’s curse, and other strategies to improve auction performance.

The Rising Risk of Antibiotic Resistance

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 the week, as the World Health Organization will make make it the focus of Thursday’s World Health Day. It’s also the subject of a helpful overview in this week’s Economist.

Antibiotic resistance isn’t new. Indeed, as the Economist notes, Alexander Fleming identified this threat in the 1940s. But it appears to be getting worse. Evolutionary pressure combines with market failure to speed the creation of resistant bacteria:

Convenience and laziness top the list of causes of antibiotic resistance. That is because those who misuse these drugs mostly do not pay the cost. Antibiotics work against bacteria, not viruses, yet patients who press their doctors to prescribe them for viral infections such as colds or influenza are seldom harmed by their self-indulgence. Nor are the doctors who write useless prescriptions in order to rid their surgeries of such hypochondriacs. The hypochondriacs can, though, act as breeding grounds for resistant bacteria that may infect others. Even when the drug has been correctly prescribed, those who fail to finish the course are similarly guilty of promoting resistance. In some parts of the world, even prescription is unnecessary. Many antibiotics are bought over the counter, with neither diagnosis nor proper recommendations for use, multiplying still further the number of human reaction vessels from which resistance can emerge.

In economics lingo, there is an externality. If I take an antibiotic, I get the health or psychological benefits. But I also increase the odds of a new resistant strain of bacteria developing, particularly if I don’t take the drug appropriately. But patients and doctors often don’t take that risk into account when deciding whether and how to use an antibiotic.

That’s a tough problem to crack. The standard economist playbook says we ought to disseminate better information and strengthen incentives so that patients and doctors take these risks into account. Better guidelines for prescribing doctors, perhaps, along with better ways of monitoring and rewarding patients for taking the drugs appropriately. One might even consider a Pigouvian tax to discourage antibiotic use, although that raises a host of concerns of its own.

In addition, we could try to expand the supply of new antibiotics.

That raises the usual questions of how best to encourage innovation through patents, prizes, government-subsidized R&D, changes to the drug approval process, etc. But even intelligent policy can’t overcome nature itself. As the graph from the Economist suggests, the potential pool of antibiotics may be drying up.

Curation versus Search

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 I can follow people who curate the web for me. News organizations, journalists, fellow bloggers, and others provide an endless stream of links to interesting stories, facts, and research. For me, Twitter is a modern day clipping service that I can customize to my idiosyncratic tastes.

Several of my Facebook friends are also remarkable curators, as are many of the blogs that I follow (e.g., Marginal Revolution and Infectious Greed, to name just two).  So curation turns out to be perhaps the most important service I consume on the web. In the wilderness of information, skilled guides are essential.

Of course, I also use Google dozens of times each day. Curation is great, but sometimes what you need is a good search engine. But as Paul Kedrosky over at Infectious Greed notes, search sometimes doesn’t work. That’s one reason that Paul sees curation gaining on search, at least for now:

Instead, the re-rise of curation is partly about crowd curation — not one people, but lots of people, whether consciously (lists, etc.) or unconsciously (tweets, etc) — and partly about hand curation (JetSetter, etc.). We are going to increasingly see nichey services that sell curation as a primary feature, with the primary advantage of being mostly unsullied by content farms, SEO spam, and nonsensical Q&A sites intended to create low-rent versions of Borges’ Library of Babylon. The result will be a subset of curated sites that will re-seed a new generation of algorithmic search sites, and the cycle will continue, over and over.

Google More Popular Than Wikipedia … in 1900

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 humorous glitch department, I tried out the names of two Internet services I use everyday, Google and Wikipedia. For some reason, the Ngram viewer defaults to the timeperiod 1800 to 2000 (rather than 2008), and this was the chart I got (click to see a larger version):

It’s amazing to see references to Wikipedia as far back as the 1820s. Impressive foresight. Google overtook Wikipedia in the late 1800s and, with the exception of a brief period in the 1970s, has led ever since.

Thanksgiving Reading

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:

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

No, the Web Isn’t Dead (Yet)

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 about economics, finance, and life, etc. — has been declining.

Chris Anderson cites this as evidence of the pending death of the web. To which there is only one thing to say: wait a minute buster. Just because the web’s share of total bits and bytes is falling doesn’t mean it’s dying. Maybe it’s just that the other services are growing more rapidly.

One of the benefits of being off the grid for a week-plus is that other commentators have already had the same thought and have tracked down the relevant data. Kudos to Rob Beschizza at BoingBoing for charting the data in absolute terms. Rather than dying, the web is still growing like fresh bacteria in a petri dish:

The Weird Economics of Cellular Calling Plans

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 weird,” said Barry Nalebuff, an economics professor at the Yale School of Management. “You pay $60 to make your first phone call. Your next 1,000 minutes are free. Then the minute after that costs 35 cents.”

I frequently use cell phone pricing to illustrate key ideas in my microeconomics class. For example, why is it often impossible to get a signal for my beloved iPhone? Because the marginal cost of downloading data is zero, and AT&T’s bandwidth is often overwhelmed. And why do cell phones usually charge a monthly fee rather than just a per-call or per-minute fee? Because they can get more revenue by offering a low (or zero) per-minute price coupled to a high monthly fee.

Still, as the article suggests, the complexity of cell phone pricing can sometimes seems inexplicable. Which reminds me of one of my favorite TV ads, starring Catherine Zeta Jones and a group of economists who are determined to explain cell phone pricing to consumers:

For my interpretation of the ad, see this post.

Netflix Avoids the Sunk Cost Fallacy

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 a decade, but Reed Hastings was finally ready to unveil the device he thought would upend the entertainment industry. The gadget looked as unassuming as the original iPod—a sleek black box, about the size of a paperback novel, with a few jacks in back—and Hastings, CEO of Netflix, believed its impact would be just as massive. Called the Netflix Player, it would allow most of his company’s regular DVD-by-mail subscribers to stream unlimited movies and TV shows from Netflix’s library directly to their television—at no extra charge.

The potential was enormous: Although Netflix initially could offer only about 10,000 titles, Hastings planned to one day deliver the entire recorded output of Hollywood, instantly and in high definition, to any screen, anywhere. Like many tech romantics, he had harbored visions of using the Internet to route around cable companies and network programmers for years. Even back when he formed Netflix in 1997, Hastings predicted a day when he would deliver video over the Net rather than through the mail. (There was a reason he called the company Netflix and not, say, DVDs by Mail.) Now, in mid-December 2007, the launch of the player was just weeks away. Promotional ads were being shot, and internal beta testers were thrilled.

But Hastings wasn’t celebrating. Instead, he felt queasy. For weeks, he had tried to ignore the nagging doubts he had about the Netflix Player. Consumers’ living rooms were already full of gadgets—from DVD players to set-top boxes. Was a dedicated Netflix device really the best way to bring about his video-on-demand revolution? So on a Friday morning, he asked the six members of his senior management team to meet him in the amphitheater in Netflix’s Los Gatos offices, near San Jose. He leaned up against the stage and asked the unthinkable: Should he kill the player?

Three days later, at an all-company meeting in the same amphitheater, Hastings announced that there would be no Netflix Player.

In short, Reed Hastings is not a man who gets locked in by sunk costs: he’s willing to kill projects (or, in this case, spin them off) even if he’s got years invested in them. A good example for my students when we discusses costs in a few weeks. And just another example of the strengths of Netflix’s culture.