The Microsoft Bing team responsible for conducting controlled experiments have a paper out that canvasses some practical problems they’ve come across in the thousands of experiments that they’ve run. It’s an interesting read, even if the subject matter isn’t particularly fascinating for those outside the search business. A lot of the things they find sound […]
Education, particularly at the tertiary level, is usually viewed as an investment by economists. It’s a voluntary cost that you pay to get skills and qualifications that will increase your future wealth and prosperity. That metaphor is reflected in the wealth of research into the ‘rate of return’ on university study and the discussions of […]
What makes people attractive to each other? Is it really male power and female beauty that are overwhelmingly important? The data suggests not: First, people with higher status are, on average, rated more physically attractive—perhaps because they are less likely to be overweight and more likely to afford braces and nice clothes, trips to the […]
Many economists are becoming increasingly technocratic in their desire to shape the economy to fit their favourite theory. However, behind their desire to improve the lot of their compatriots looms the shadow of public choice theory, scorning their efforts to shape public debate. Indeed, many libertarians are so persuaded by public choice ideas that they […]
The surprising complexity of orange juice production: Revenue Analytics consultant Bob Cross, architect of Coke’s juice model, also built the model Delta Air Lines uses to maximize its revenue per mile flown. Orange juice, says Cross, “is definitely one of the most complex applications of business analytics. It requires analyzing up to 1 quintillion decision variables […]
We’ve been slightly obsessed with Deirdre McCloskey on TVHE for quite a while now but only just got around to reading her book, ‘The Rhetoric of Economics’, recently. The central premise of the book is that economists write to persuade, so we can use the theory of rhetoric to analyse economists’ writings and arguments. She […]