I’ve updated the books spreadsheet with a few reviews–some long, some short.
Books Updated
February 8, 2010 · Leave a Comment
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Tagged: books
Casino Capitalism
February 7, 2010 · 1 Comment
Really interesting article on page one of Friday’s Wall Street Journal:
Investors are sometimes accused of treating the stock market like a casino. Now, one Wall Street firm wants to treat casinos like the stock market.
Bond-trading specialist Cantor Fitzgerald in March took over the management of sports betting at the M Resort, a new 390-room hotel and casino on the Strip’s southern edge.
“We wanted to turn gamblers into traders,” says Lee Amaitis, the 60-year-old Cantor executive who runs the gambling division, Cantor Gaming.
To do that, the company has transformed Las Vegas sports betting into something it thinks is akin to derivatives trading. By using financial-markets technology, Cantor allows bettors to wager not only on who might win the game or by how much, but also on whether a team can complete its next pass or make a field goal.
Essentially, in-game betting of this nature is not new. However, it is not a robust practice here in the United States. In fact, Cantor is seemingly the only firm that allows for such bets at this time (the practice is apparently common in Europe). What is interesting is that such an approach allows gamblers (or what are essentially traders) to effectively hedge their bets (investments): Continue reading
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Tagged: Economics, gambling
Top Posts for January 2010
February 2, 2010 · Leave a Comment
Here are the top 10 most viewed posts during the month of January. Thanks for reading!
- Free-rider Businesses
- Visualizing my Social Network
- Open-ended vs. Scale Questions: A note on survey methodology
- Adaptation and Nudge Strategies
- An Innovator’s Dilemma: Amazon and Apple
- Crowdsourcing Resources
- Disruption and Incentives: Lessons Learn
- Evaluating Human Capital Investments Through the Prism of Baseball
- Strategy for (dealing with) Growth
- The Apple-Amazon War Begins 1/27
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Applying Social Science Concepts to Business: E-Book Edition
January 31, 2010 · Leave a Comment
Sunday’s Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon has stopped selling Kindle versions of all Macmillan titles. John Sargent, Macmillian’s CEO, recently went to Amazon’s headquarters to try and negotiate new terms for the sale of e-books published by his company. In general, the publishing industry has been unhappy with Amazon’s insistence that most books be priced at $9.99. Apparently, the discussions resulted in Amazon pulling all Macmillan e-books from it’s website.
I am a firm believer that the historical knock on the social sciences is unwarranted and that many of the theories, frameworks, and concepts found in the various disciplines are widely applicable in the real world, business in particular. So when I read about the Amazon-Macmillan dispute I was struck at how a number of social science concepts shed quite a bit of light on these developments; namely Albert Hirschman’s concepts of exit, voice, and loyalty as well as signaling and the indirect use of force.
So what do these concepts have to do with e-books? Glad you asked. Continue reading
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Tagged: Amazon.com, Apple, e-books, Economics, political economy, signals, social science
Fear the Boom and Bust
January 30, 2010 · 1 Comment
This video has been making the rounds recently. One doesn’t immediately think of rap and macroeconomic theory together, but the video does a really good job of boiling down the two dominant schools of thought and what their disagreements primarily revolve around. There are some really smart touches in the video (e.g. Hayek peering into his hotel room’s nightstand and seeing a copy of Keynes’ General Theory)–it’s well worth the 7 minutes it takes to view it.
Hat tip to Marginal Revolution and Jon Western
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Tagged: Economics
Adaptation and Nudge Strategies
January 26, 2010 · Leave a Comment
Jeff Ely over at the excellent Cheap Talk writes about his attempt to fool himself into being punctual:
I once tried setting my watch ahead a few minutes to help me make it to appointments on time. At first it worked, but not because I was fooled. I would glance at the watch, get worried that I was late, then remember that the watch is fast. But that brief flash acted as a sort of preview of how it feels to be late. And the feeling is a better motivator than the thought in the abstract.
But that didn’t last very long. The surprise wore off. I wonder if there are ways to maintain the surprise. For example, instead of setting the watch a fixed time ahead, I could set it to run too fast so that it gained an extra minute every week or month. Then if I have adaptive expectations I could consistently fool myself.
This reminded me of an older post of mine that discussed the potential for a “novelty curve” with various nudge strategies. It was in relation to the Volkswagen-sponsored Fun Theory project. Here is what I wrote: Continue reading
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Tagged: behavioral economics, nudge strategies, Strategy
Linkage for 1.21.2010
January 21, 2010 · 1 Comment
- The Limits of Innovation: “And the last argument for the limits of innovation has to do with human nature. Why we choose to adopt things is not a logical process, and is fueled by culture, psychology, timing, and a dozen factors, many which have little to do with new idea X being better than old idea Y in technological or design terms. Those are terms technologists and designers obsess about, despite history’s strong suggestion that those factors are overestimated in their role for what becomes dominant, and when.”
- Ant Colonies are Super-Organisms: “There are economies of scale within a single organism but not across.Except with ant colonies. The mass to energy ratio of the colony as a whole follows the same law that governs indivduals of non-colony animals.”
- Prediction Without Markets: “In a new study, Daniel Reeves, Duncan Watts, Dave Pennock and I compare the performance of prediction markets to conventional means of forecasting, namely polls and statistical models. Examining thousands of sporting and movie events, we find that the relative advantage of prediction markets is remarkably small.” Jeff at Cheap Talk offers a methodological critique of the study.
- A Little Less Conversation: “When you have a team of one person, you have no communication requirements. None. Add a second person, and now you have a single connection: Adam and Mary have to talk to each other once in a while. Now add a third person, say, Srinivas, and suddenly we’ve gone from one connection to three, since Srinivas has to talk to Adam and Mary. Add a fourth person. I’m running out of names here to help me out — OK: Britney. If we add her, and she needs to coordinate with all of them, you get six connections. For the mathematically inclined, the formula is that if you have n people on your team, there are (n2-n)/2 connections. In 2006, Moishe Lettvin, a former programmer at Microsoft, wrote a blog post describing the year he spent coordinating the list of items that would be featured on one menu in Windows Vista — the menu you use to turn off your computer. Lettvin figured that 43 people all had a voice in designing this one menu. Forty-three! By Brooks’s formula, that means managing 903 connections. Lettvin says he spent so much time on coordination tasks that, in 12 months, he produced fewer than 200 lines of code.”
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Tagged: communication, crowdsourcing, Economics, Prediction Markets
The Apple-Amazon War Begins 1/27
January 19, 2010 · 1 Comment
My very first post back in August of last year examined Amazon’s attempt to disrupt the publishing industry through the release of their Kindle reading device. The irony, of course, was that while Amazon was looking to Apple and the iPod and iTunes as inspiration their plans were most likely to be thwarted (or, at least, complicated) in the long term by Apple:
Apple could very well launch an e-reader of its own, one that vastly improves on Amazon’s market-leading Kindle. Specifically, Apple could develop a reader that utilizes their leading touchscreen technology so that readers can intuitively flip through pages of magazines or books (a feature the Kindle currently lacks), develop their reader so that media is presented in color (the Kindle is gray scale), and provide a larger viewing screen. And while Steve Jobs has previously denied a desire to get into the e-reader market, Apple is apparently full-go towards developing and launching their own tablet computer. Such a device could be a “Kindle-killer”.
After months of speculation, it appears we will get our first look at Apple’s tablet on January 27th which will likely ship in March of this year. Additionally, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that HarperCollins is in negotiations with Apple to make their titles available in an enhanced electronic format for the release of Apple’s tablet: Continue reading
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Tagged: Amazon.com, Apple, e-books, e-reader
Politics and Infographics
January 19, 2010 · Leave a Comment
Cliff Kuang at Fast Company points to a short, interesting talk by Alex Lundry of TargetPoint Consulting.
Lundry quickly runs down the importance of infographics and data visualizations in the political realm. Bottom line: people are hard wired to learn through visualization, and infographics can be very powerful tools in political battles over ideas and policy:
It amazes me that we haven’t seen a faster uptake among professional politicians of data visualization, especially considering the sheer number of political operatives, consultants, and strategic communication firms. All it takes is about five minutes watching C-SPAN to realize that these folks are due for a major upgrade in the infographics department.
I also love Lundry’s updating of a famous H.G. Wells quote
Visual Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write.
Personally, I think you need both visual and statistical in there, but in general I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment.
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Tagged: data visualization, Marketing and Advertising, politics
Disruption and Incentives: Lessons Learned from Scientific Publication
January 18, 2010 · 2 Comments
Michael Clarke over at The Scholarly Kitchen writes an interesting post on the reasons why the institution of scientific publication has not been disrupted yet by new technologies and processes:
When Tim Berners-Lee created the Web in 1991, it was with the aim of better facilitating scientific communication and the dissemination of scientific research. Put another way, the Web was designed to disrupt scientific publishing. It was not designed to disrupt bookstores, telecommunications, matchmaking services, newspapers, pornography, stock trading, music distribution, or a great many other industries.
And yet it has.
The one thing that one could have reasonably predicted in 1991, however, was that scientific communication—and the publishing industry that supports the dissemination of scientific research—would radically change over the next couple decades.
And yet it has not.
Clarke admits that there have been a number of changes and advancements in the dissemination of and collaboration around scientific data and literature. However, he rightly points out that these changes have been largely incremental, not disruptive. For Clarke, the question is ‘why hasn’t scientific publishing been disrupted already?’ Clarke’s bottom line: the incentives held by the scientific community that developed as a result of journal publication do not lend themselves to being disrupted by technological change. Continue reading
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Tagged: Disruptive Innovation, market research, peer review, Science
