Economics

Walmart Supports Employer Health Care to Raise Rivals’ Costs

2 Comments / Economics, Politics / By

Lynne Kiesling I have to admit, I thought that this point was obvious. Clearly Walmart (accurately, I think) sees itself as well-positioned to leverage its size nationally to negotiate better health care arrangements than its competitors, so its newly-announced support of employer-based health care is a classic example of raising rivals’ costs. Apparently, it’s not …

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Technology and Changing the Business Model in the Electricity Industry

2 Comments / Economics, Electricity, Technology / By

Lynne Kiesling Germany’s utility Yellow Strom is a technology leader. They are leading in the introduction of digital technology in the interface between their wires network and the customer’s home; for example they are one of the first partners with Google to roll out Google’s Power Meter, and they are working on an application that …

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Open-Road Electronic Tolling Also Reduces Emissions

Economics, Environmental policy / By

Lynne Kiesling Today a post from Ben Casselman at the WSJ’s Environmental Capital highlights one of my favorite unintended benefits of open-road electronic tolling: by eliminating deceleration and acceleration to pay a cash toll, electronic tolling reduces emisssions, with one big caveat: So does eliminating toll booths really cut down on emissions? The answer appears …

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Boldrin, Romer, and Roberts on Intellectual Property

1 Comment / Economics / By

Lynne Kiesling I’ve had a lovely morning catching up on some of Russ Roberts’ EconTalk podcasts. In particular, I listened back-to-back to Michele Boldrin discussing intellectual property and Paul Romer discussing growth, including intellectual property institutions, with Russ. As the show notes for the Boldrin podcast note, “Boldrin argues that copyright and patent are used …

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Hohm, and Cloud Computing

1 Comment / Economics, Electricity / By

Lynne Kiesling Last week I wrote about Microsoft’s Hohm energy management product announcement. Yesterday at earth2tech, Katie Fehrenbacher elaborated on the cloud computing angle, and how Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service might change energy data storage, computing, and business models. Microsoft, Google, and others are all exploring cloud computing, for good reason: The trend of …

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Transparency and Representation in the Waxman-Markey Vote

3 Comments / Economics, Liberty, Politics / By

Lynne Kiesling In his usual trenchant way, Jonathan Adler has hit upon the two things to which I object the most in the Waxman-Markey bill and vote. The first is the one about which I wrote in May: despite all of the tooth-gnashing and knicker-twisting about the cap-and-trade portions of the bill, the really egregious …

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Is Either Google or Facebook the Model of the Internet’s Future?

1 Comment / Economics, Technology / By

Lynne Kiesling Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, claims that Google’s information and relationship model is top-down, Big Brother, while Facebook’s is bottom up and organic means of creating and gathering information based on social networks. He’s been making this claim quite vocally lately, and this Wired article provides a detailed discussion of the issues raised in …

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