Economics

Sopa/Pipa Protests and the Economics of Content Market Power

Lynne Kiesling I found some things striking in yesterday’s SOPA/PIPA protests. One was Jim Harper’s clear and cogent statement that the Internet is not a thing, it’s a set of protocols stipulating how computers communicate with each other. That set of protocols is a platform, and those protocols are not the government’s to regulate. Jim’s …

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Breaking News: State Regulatory Procedures Do Not Favor Consumers

Lynne Kiesling As is the vernacular these days, your response to the title of this post is probably “I know, right?” Or, if you prefer sarcasm, you may say “no, really?” This is the conclusion of an all-too-rare piece of investigative journalism from Dan Garino at the Columbus Dispatch: Ohio’s unique system for setting electricity …

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David Henderson on Crony Capitalism

The KP Chicago contingent is still on vacation, barely recovered from the end-of-term rush and grading, and the KP Texas contingent is still head-down-pen-moving over the aforementioned grading; thus the relative calm here. In the interim, I cannot recommend highly enough David Henderson’s recounting of his talk at Occupy Monterey. David’s notes contain substantive and …

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“Market Failure”: You Keep Using That Term. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.

Lynne Kiesling Steve Horwitz’s column in The Freeman today is a great explication of why the phrase “market failure” is so problematic, and so often misused and abused in public policy analysis when employed to criticize market outcomes. Steve does a good job of explaining the origins of the phrase in the standard textbook case …

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An Example of What Not to Do in Persuasion

Lynne Kiesling Alex Tabarrok has an excellent post this morning at Marginal Revolution: David Warsh and Paul Krugman try to write Hayek out of the history of macroeconomics. … It is true that many of Hayek’s specific ideas about business cycles vanished from the mainstream discussion under the Keynesian juggernaut but what Krugman and Warsh miss is that …

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An Sea Meetings Coda

Lynne Kiesling John Whitehead already mentioned our joint AERE/USAEE session at the SEA meetings last week. It turned out well, a combination of carbon offsets analysis and electricity market design experiments. Rim Baltaduonis from Gettysburg College presented two different, interesting experimental papers, one on designing rules for enabling contracts for carbon sequestration in soil (which …

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