Michael Giberson As just noted, the CFTC has approved Media Derivatives request to establish Trend Exchange, a box office futures exchange. At Midas Oracle, Chris Masse reacts to the news by drawing attention to remarks by CFTC commissioners suggesting that it may be difficult for Trend Exchange to gain the subsequent CFTC approvals needed for …
Michael Giberson Today the CFTC approved Media Derivatives Inc.’s request to create a futures exchange based on box office receipts. The exchange “is primarily focused on the development of a variety of products to benefit the entertainment industry with one if its initially proposed products being designed to help mitigate risk and enhance the successful …
Lynne Kiesling I’ve been meaning to write about the libertarian paternalism series at Cato Unbound for a week or so, but have been too busy to pull it off. Happily, Ilya Somin has a good post that touches on a couple of the themes I wanted to raise (and I second his recommendation to read …
Lynne Kiesling I love this story; it’s like Knowledge Problem + Aguanomics = individual choice, efficiency, conservation, and elegance. Water conservation is a large and growing concern, in large part because our public policy does such an abominable job of creating a framework/market design to send good scarcity signals to diverse individual users, and to …
Technology + Dynamic Pricing Conserves Water Too (duh) Read More »
Lynne Kiesling … he just doesn’t realize it, or doesn’t know that it’s an established regulatory concept. Recently in his Undercover Economist blog, Tim Harford picked up on an idea floated by another FT columnist: … we need tariff schemes that encourage conservation. One option is “reverse pricing”, a simple framework that would increase the …
Lynne Kiesling I noticed recently that Steve Levitt opined briefly on the health care bill in ways that are consistent with my earlier argument that unless Congress tackled the third-party payer problem head on they would be wasting our time and money. In his Freakonomics post, Levitt recommends Gary Becker’s analysis to us: In Becker’s …
Lynne Kiesling We were in Columbus, Ohio over the weekend and early this week and, not surprisingly, the airwaves were full of news of a new ad campaign to rehabilitate ethanol and, in the words of one of the news stories we heard, “correct myths about ethanol”. So are they saying that it’s a myth …
Lynne Kiesling Last week I was honored to spend a couple of days at St. Lawrence University with Steve Horwitz and his students and colleagues. In addition to giving a talk on regulation and technological change in the electricity industry, I gave a guest lecture in an environmental economics class and participated in a reading …
Buchanan & Wagner’s “Democracy in Deficit” and Its Current Applications Read More »
Michael Giberson Tyler Cowen links to a story in the New York Times detailing the opposition of the Motion Picture Association of America to two proposed markets for forecasting movie ticket sales. Of the objections noted in the article, Cowen thinks the key issue for Hollywood is the possibility of a poor market showing making …
Michael Giberson International accounting firm Grant Thornton has surveyed 2,500 hotel and other properties in South Africa and concluded that about half of the properties will not be charging a premium rate during the upcoming World Cup. In some cities, however, a majority of properties were raising rates, sometimes significantly. (Another summary: “Fifty three percent …
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