Lynne Kiesling Remember the first time you bought a mobile phone (which in my case was 1995). You may have been happy with your land line phone, but this new mobile phone thing looks like it would be really handy in an emergency, so you-in-1995 said sure, I’ll get a cell phone, but not really …
Over the past week professional cycling has been thrown topsy-turvy by the fallout from the US Anti-Doping Agency’s report on their investigation into performance-enhancing drug (PED) use in the U.S. Postal Service team, 1998-2006. The focus of the dossier is, of course, Lance Armstrong, and the eyewitness testimony is extensive and not very surprising to …
In my remarks the other day about this year’s Roth/Shapley Nobel, I said that I thought the work was important and useful because it led to the implementation of better institutions in situations in which prices are unlikely to emerge organically. A post from Andrew Coulson at Cato at Liberty fleshes out some reasons why …
Lynne Kiesling I have little to add to today’s congratulations to Al Roth and Lloyd Shapley for this year’s Nobel; Peter Klein has a useful roundup of links to good commentary, with a namecheck to us, in his link to his discussion of market design back in 2007 (thanks!). Mike’s frequent posts on price gouging …
Lynne Kiesling A forthcoming article in the Journal of Industrial Ecology reports on a lifecycle analysis comparing electric vehicles with internal combustion vehicles (at the moment the full article is available for our edification!). This thorough analysis looks at the resource use and environmental impact of the production, use, and disposal of the vehicle. From …
Lifecycle Analysis: Environmental Impact of Electric Vehicles Ambiguous Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Actually it’s over 350 years old, but as the Economist points out this week, there’s a new critical edition of Leviathan for the first time in 350 years. The Economist article is a good reminder that what was shocking about Hobbes in the 17th century — his mechanistic materialism — isn’t quite as …
Lynne Kiesling Got any bets in any Nobel pools? Calling up any of your chemist friends and putting on a fake Swedish accent? Yes, it’s that time again, when the 2012 Nobel prizes are announced. I have no predictions or inclinations for this year’s economics prize, but I’d be interested in yours if you’ve got …
Lynne Kiesling In yesterday’s New York Times, Charles Duhigg and Steve Lohr have a detailed, thorough article analyzing the myriad ways that our traditional patent system is ill-suited to beneficial innovation processes in technology. Here’s a taste, but you should really read the whole thing, as I will be having my freshman seminar students do …
Lynne Kiesling For the past year and a half the Federal Trade Commission has been investigating the potential anti-competitive effects of Google’s search-based business model. The European Union has also been pursuing antitrust complaints against Google. The main accusation is Google search bias — Google’s algorithm prioritizes links both to paid advertisers (which are shaded …
Lynne Kiesling You may have seen the article in Sunday’s New York Times on how “wasteful” data centers are — they use large amounts of electricity to enable the level of redundancy required to achieve the degree of reliability and uptime that consumers expect from their Internet activities. I put the word “waste” in quotes …
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