Lynne Kiesling So I woke up this morning ready to write about a few things, but our ISP has other ideas. They are having domain-name server problems, and the only computer in the house that doesn’t use DHCP to get its directions is my husband’s, but even that one is running slow. To put it …
Michael Giberson Tell your teacher the World Bank said chewing gum helps you learn. (Via Truck and Barter, a World Bank Report Efficient Learning for the Poor: Insights from the Frontier of Cognitive Neuroscience, citing research in Psychopharmacology and Archives of Oral Biology.)
Lynne Kiesling My friend John Nye has a new paper up at SSRN with Charles Moul. They find that the pattern of draws when Soviet players faced each other is consistent with collusion, not competition: We expand the set of outcomes considered by the tournament literature to include draws and use games from post-war chess …
Lynne Kiesling Today’s New York Times has an article about a possible new transmission project from northern New York southeast into Orange County (registration required). Here’s the deal: for the past decade there has been increasing anxiety about the ability of the existing high-voltage transmission network to support the increasingly distributed commercial transactions that have …
Don’t Like New Power Lines? How About Using Dynamic Retail Pricing Instead? Read More »
Lynne Kiesling The ever-clever Jonathan Rauch has a Reason column today in which he makes a provocative proposal to President Bush: Here is the idea: Propose an international treaty whose signatories would agree to eliminate gasoline from their transportation systems by a date certain—say, in 30 years. Seek initial support from Europe and Japan, but …
Imagine There’s No Gasoline (No Demand for It, That Is) Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Over at the Sports Economist Brian has a post with three recommendations to improve international soccer: post-match review and penalties for diving and melodrama, more granularity in penalties around the penalty box, and two more officials on the field. I chuckled when Brian referred to “Sepp Blatter and the FIFAcrats who seem to …
Institutions Matter: Rules, Outcomes, and the World Cup Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Mike Munger’s new essay on rent seeking is superb. Mike is a fluid and persuasive writer, so he does a great job of explaining some of the hardest-to-understand aspects of rent seeking. In particular, the competition for politically-distributed resources means that people will use up resources to get the political goods. That competition …
Michael Giberson Adidas has generated a lot of talk and press over its new Teamgeist soccer ball design, which has been on display at this year’s World Cup. A FIFA story on the public introduction of the ball in December 2005 said it would be “loved by goalscorers, feared by goalkeepers??? and “offers a guarantee …
New Adidas Ball a Gift for World Cup Goalkeepers Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Technology Review has an interview with Kara Kockelman from the University of Texas about transportation technologies, pricing, and other ways of reducing congestion. When asked about the effect of new technology like cameras, she observes that But while information is helpful to those seeking to avoid some congestion, these basic technologies are not …
Don’t Like Congestion? Then Maybe You’ll Like Pricing Better Read More »
Lynne Kiesling I’ve made my first foray into prediction markets, at Inkling. The market is Will Ronaldo Still Play for Manchester United Next Season? I was looking for such a contract at TradeSports, but no such contract exists, so I made my own. The Telegraph reports gossip from tabloid newspapers that includes a claim that …
A Prediction Market: Will Ronaldo Still Play for Manu Next Season? Read More »
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