Michael Giberson Now normally I wouldn’t be the kind of guy that looks to politicians for economic advice (e.g. posting on price gouging), but on his blog Alan Jewell points out an article from the December 2004 Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis showing that as a group senators have done abnormally well at picking …
Michael Giberson Price gouging has been all over the news lately. In Kentucky the state Attorney General has sued Marathon Oil for allegedly gouging customers in the months after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. (Marathon is counter-suing the state, claiming the state’s law is unconstitutional on a number of grounds.) In Missouri the state has recently …
Michael Giberson At the suggestion of prediction market scholars Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz, InTrade is running a market on the XM-Sirius satellite radio merger. The apparent verdict? Market says, “maybe next year.” For the moment, the “The XM and Sirius satellite merger to close before the end of Dec 2007” contract most recently traded …
Prediction Markets on Xm-sirius Merger: Maybe Next Year Read More »
Lynne Kiesling How cool is this? Purdue engineering researchers have made major progress on a new internal combustion engine design, using variable valve actuation. One remarkable innovation in this research is removing the connection between the crankshaft and the camshaft, which is what drives the pistons up and down. This design has been at the …
Michael Giberson The Washington Post has a story on “socially responsible investing,” which puzzles over the below average returns that such investment funds seem to offer: [I]nvestors often pay a price when they add social considerations to the mix. Socially responsible investing funds, including expenses, generally trail traditional competitors, according to Morningstar data. For the …
The Supply and Demand for Socially Conscious Investments Read More »
Michael Giberson As mentioned here before, Inkling offers a public play-money prediction market. I stumbled across them a year or so ago, and because I’m interested in market design and prediction markets, I decided to try them out. Partly because playing the Inkling markets amuses me and partly because I started doing well, I’ve continue …
Secrets of an Inkling Top Trader: Spotting Riskless Arbitrage Opportunities Read More »
Michael Giberson A number of prominent economists have signed on to a statement seeking reform of government policy toward prediction markets. The abstract: Prediction markets are markets for contracts that yield payments based on the outcome of an uncertain future event, such as a presidential election. Using these markets as forecasting tools could substantially improve …
Economists Seek Safe Harbor for Small Stakes Prediction Markets Read More »
Lynne Kiesling Here’s one reason why I’ve been so incommunicado for the past few weeks: Retail Electricity Deregulation: Prospects and Challenges for Dynamic Pricing and Enabling Technologies, a paper for the new Searle Center Annual Review of Regulation at Northwestern University. Here’s a teaser from the introduction: Optimistic expectations from the 1990s restructuring changes have …
Lynne Kiesling Here it is, the first week in May, and finally we have the whinging and melodrama that I usually associate with March or April (see, for example, the KP archives from March 2004, with lots of gasoline posts): record high gas prices!. Just two weeks ago, the U.S. average for a gallon of …
Michael Giberson I’ve just finished Ken Steiglitz’s book, Snipers, Shills, and Sharks: eBay and Human Behavior. Don’t let the subtitle throw you – the book is neither narrowly limited to eBay nor broadly focused on human behavior. Instead, the book is the best-writted introduction to auction theory I’ve seen. Steiglitz is a Princeton University computer …
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