Google Reader Feed: My Shared Items
J.C. Bradbury is skeptical that as currently practiced, MLB’s revenue sharing system has had an appreciable impact on the competitive balance of the league: [C]ompetitive balance improved from the 1930s until leveling off in the late-1980s and early-1990s. Much of this improvement was likely a natural consequence of more high-quality talent becoming available to more [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: baseball, incentives, revenue sharing | 2 Comments »
“Chirol” of Coming Anarchy (which is a fantastic blog for those interested in global and comparative politics) comments on the recent news that Somali pirates have set up what amounts to a stock exchange to help fund their operations. Chirol quotes from the original Reuters story: It is a lucrative business that has drawn financiers [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Economics, incentives, piracy, political risk | 2 Comments »
The current issue of Wired (not available on-line as of this posting) has a must-read article cover story: Gone. The premise was to determine how easily someone could disappear and adopt a new identity in the digital age. While people can easily adopt a new life on-line, it would appear exceedingly difficult to avoid detection [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: crowdsourcing, incentives, reputation | 1 Comment »
Last week, the WSJ ran an article on the increasing use of insights from behavioral economics by businesses and organizations. Organizations are using these insights to ‘nudge‘ customers and clients toward specific behaviors–e.g. using less energy, opting in to the home delivery of prescription drugs, etc. The essence of behavioral economics is that humans fail [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: behavioral economics, incentives, interests, nudging, relational data | 2 Comments »
Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational and a blog of the same name, explores NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to make bus fare free. Bloomberg’s plan is to eliminate fares on a few of the fares in the hopes of speeding up the famously slow buses. How would this help? The plan assumes that there are [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: background checks, incentives, Recession | Leave a Comment »
Fiction
Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)
Non-fiction
The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball
Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value
The Numbers Game
Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate
Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception
The Rational Optimist
The Quiet American
How Doctors Think
The Wisdom of Whores
Switch
Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory
