Reason In Dc
Lynne Kiesling If you are attending Reason In DC on Saturday, I’ll see you there! Won’t be there today, though. Tomorrow Ron Bailey, Fred Smith and I will discuss carbon policy. Should be a stimulating discussion …
Economics
How Important Will Plug-in Hybrids Be?
Lynne Kiesling To answer my own question: dunno. But the technology has a lot of promise. The Wikipedia entry on plug-in hybrid vehicles” is a thorough and well-cited background on the technology and its potential. In particular, of course, I am interested in the vehicle’s intersection with the electric power network: PHEVs and fully electric …
Zitzewitz Asks: Is Sports Betting Legal if You Bundle It with Furniture?
Michael Giberson At Midas Oracle, Eric Zitzewitz asks, “Is sports betting legal if you bundle it with furniture?” A furniture retailer in Boston offered furniture that would be free to customers purchasing a mattress, dining table, sofa, or bed between March 7 and April 16, if it turned out that the Red Sox won the …
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The Nobel Prize in Economics and the Usual Less Than Noble Complaints
Michael Giberson It happens every year. The Nobel prize in economics is announced, the prize winner is delighted, as are his colleagues, his department, his university, newspaper articles get written and published. And then, before the papers hit the recycling bin, the complaints begin. This year the New York Times captures some of the complaints …
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Arnold Kling Imagines
Michael Giberson Arnold Kling writes, “After reading his book One Economics, Many Recipes, I keep imagining myself debating Dani Rodrik…and losing.” Among other things, Kling suggests Rodrik offers “industrial policy with an Austrian slant” — he quotes Rodrik’s book as saying “the right way of thinking of industrial policy is as a discovery process–one where …
Al Roth’s “The Art of Designing Markets”
Michael Giberson Want to learn more about market design? Al Roth has an article, “The Art of Designing Markets,” in the October 2007 edition of the Harvard Business Review. The article is available to subscribers online, or perhaps you can find it at your local bookstore. The introduction: Traditional economics views markets as simply the …
Economist Befuddled By Airline Industry
Lynne Kiesling I really like this column by economist Charlie Wheelan about the airline industry: There are a lot of industries and businesses that I don’t thoroughly understand. But they’re different from the airlines in two key respects: 1) They don’t routinely make my life miserable; and 2) They seem to make a lot of …
Conflicting Movements In Oil Markets
Lynne Kiesling Just a quick little note that despite high crude inventories in the US, the dominant driver right now in world oil markets is the chance that Turkey will invade Iraq to attack Kurdish militants there. These roilings have added about $7/bbl to oil prices, currently hovering around $87/bbl.
More On Mechanism Design
Lynne Kiesling In the comments to my previous post on the Nobel announcement yesterday, David Tufte asks for some extended comments on the Hurwicz, Maskin, Myerson Nobel decision. My perspective shares quite a bit with those of Alex Tabarrok in Reason yesterday and Pete Boettke in the Wall Street Journal today (subs. required). Both Hurwicz …
Nobel Award: Mechanism Design
Lynne Kiesling Mechanism design is the topic awarded this year’s economics Nobel, with the award going to Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin, and Roger Myerson (two Northwestern connections there!). Mechanism design was the bread and butter of my graduate training, and has led to some important insights with respect to incentives, contract design, and market design.