Netflix makes a lot of money from understanding your viewing preferences and one thing they’ve learned is that ratings don’t matter, only viewing behaviour is predictive: Why do I see so many three- or even two-star movies in my recommendations? Gomez-Uribe: People rate movies like Schindler’s List high, as opposed to one of the silly […]
This post is a little out of the ordinary for TVHE but I thought I’d talk a bit about the tools I use every day. If you’re anything like me you spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning up data. Even something as simple as using GDP in a regression involves finding the right page […]
There’s an interesting article on the NYT about an accountant who has stopped billing by the hour: A few years ago, he said, he realized that the billable hour was undercutting his value—it was his profession’s commodity, suggesting to clients that he and his colleagues were interchangeable containers of finite, measurable units that could be […]
An interesting paper by Acemoglu and Robinson, who have long discussed the interaction between economics and politics. The basic point is that economists cannot afford to ignore politics when they make policy prescriptions. It’s well-known that policy prescriptions based on partial equilibrium models can be risky. A&R take that a step further and point out […]
Visualisation is the trendy way to represent data these days, but sight is not our only sense. Via Dave Giles I see that some researchers are exploring sonification as a way to represent information. They claim that …with complex data series one can often hear patterns or persistent pitches that would be difficult to show […]
Why is it that consumption expenditure falls off so dramatically at retirement? Some people say it’s because the lifecycle consumption model is silly and people just don’t save enough for retirement. Spanish researchers now suggest it might be because men finally lend a hand around the house, which saves a pile of cash! Detailed panel […]