Major sporting events can substantially boost demand for hotel rooms and, given the difficulty of building new hotels on short notice, lead to price hikes and consumer complaints about price gouging. As I wrote four years ago, “Super Bowls usually produce price gouging complaints,” but the complaints were especially high that year given the selection …
Lynne Kiesling This week we have many introspective analyses of the consequences of an evil act perpetrated 10 years ago. Those consequences are a mix of good and bad, ranging from no successful coordinated attacks in the U.S. to foreign wars with gruesome human and financial costs. The consequences in which I am most interested, …
Lynne Kiesling I am just back from a long weekend trip to Denver, to participate in Sunday’s Deer Creek Challenge bike ride. We did the metric century — 62 miles, with 7,022′ of elevation gain along the way. Pretty daunting for a flatlander! But this event was my “A race” (although not a race, but …
Michael Giberson Leigh Caldwell, at Knowing and Making, notes concerns raised by representatives of India’s government about unfair airline prices during the festival of Diwali. Caldwell mostly ignore the government’s chatter about unfair prices, but wonders how consumer reactions may influence company pricing decisions over time. I think he offers interesting speculations, but I think …
Unfair Prices for Holiday Air Travel in India? Any Lasting Effects? Read More »
Michael Giberson [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYGCpGzFWh0] From the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Kids Pages, an earnest warning – accompanying the lyrics to the song Big Rock Candy Mountain – not to be lead astray by the wild (and extremely unhealthy!) images conjured up by the songwriter Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock: IMPORTANT REMINDERS ABOUT THE LYRICS: Mr. McClintock’s …
The Fictional (And Extremely Unhealthy!) Big Rock Candy Mountain Read More »
Michael Giberson Phil Carson reports a few parting thoughts from last week’s IEEE Power and Energy Society’s Transmission and Distribution Conference in New Orleans. One of those thoughts centered on the last-mile link up of communications and energy systems: Marty Travers, president for telecommunications at Black & Veatch, reminded me that the “telecom” piece at …
Where Water Management Meets Electricity Consumption, and Other Notes from New Orleans Read More »
Michael Giberson Today is a day celebrated as the day, 20 years ago, the Berlin Wall fell. Technically speaking, the wall itself was breached a few days after November 9, but this is the day an East German bureaucratic mix-up inadvertently and briefly allowed East Berliners free movement into the west. When combined with events …
Lynne Kiesling The area around New Glarus, Wisconsin, is one of our favorite places when we want to get out of town. Great roads for cycling, camping, beautiful scenery, and of course the newly-expanded New Glarus Brewery. Gone are the days when we could get Spotted Cow and Uff Da Bock around here; now we …
Weekend Jaunt from Chicago: New Glarus, Wisconsin Read More »
Lynne Kiesling My colleague Shane Greenstein does very interesting work on industrial organization and networks in Internet-related industries. These insights also bubble up when he is reflecting on his personal experience in his recent family holiday travels, as related on his blog. Here he relates what they found on their recent travels to northern Wyoming, …
Lynne Kiesling We interrupt our regular discussion of economics for a public service announcement: I’ve been having a horrendous customer service experience with Budget car rental. Briefly, the re-routing of my flight to Collegiate Triathlon Nationals, due to inclement weather in Dallas, meant that I had to re-reserve the rental car, and the Expedia agent …
Psa: Bad Customer Service from Budget Car Rental Read More »
Copyright © 2022 Knowledge Problem Archive