The Economist reports that credit card companies are a whole lot smarter than I gave them credit for: Since minimum payments on credit-card statements are usually small amounts, Mr Stewart wondered whether seeing an actual amount might make people pay less than they would otherwise have done. That is exactly what he found. Click here […]
Robin Hanson says, Sure we give lip service to fairness, and we may sincerely believe that we care about it, but that mostly expresses itself as sincere outrage when our side is treated unfairly. . . . While in practice economics is full of folks promoting various sides, one of the reasons I am proud […]
Were investment bankers successful because they made their investors feel smarter for investing with them?
A Californian friend commented to me recently that NZ women have a reputation in the US for being ungroomed. She was shocked to learn that most NZ women don’t dye their hair or get weekly manicures and pedicures. More surprising still was seeing women in public without make-up on! It all reminded me of the […]
Ed Prescott has written some pretty brainy stuff in his time. I’m particularly a fan of his work on dynamic inconsistency in economics with Finn Kydland. But, here we see why you should not make heroes of people.
The Commerce Commission appears to have found an unusual source of anti-competitive behaviour: schools forcing parents to use a monopoly supplier of school uniforms. Apparently schools often accept payments from clothing manufacturers in exchange for exclusive rights to sell the school’s uniform. Then the manufacturers extract large rents from their monopoly position by charging high […]