jamesz

Credit card companies are smart

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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.
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Mr Stewart presented 413 people with mock credit-card bills of £435.76 (about $650) that were identical—except that only half mentioned a minimum payment of £5.42. Participants were asked how much they would pay.

Among those inclined to pay the bill in full, the presence of the minimum payment hardly made any difference. However, those who wanted to pay just part of it handed over 43% less on average when presented with a minimum payment. In the real world, this would roughly double interest charges.

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Matt Nolan

Analytical bias and “recession fatigue”

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Everywhere I look I am being told that the RBNZ must slash rates into heavily stimulatory territory.  There are calls for tax cuts, infrastructure spending, further unemployment relief.  There are calls that commodity prices will collapse – but the price we pay for things won’t.  Pretty much anything that could be wrong, we’re are being told is wrong.

It is easy to get caught up in this.  All the negative news and statements that the Bank MUST cut between 150-200 basis points makes me feel like “maybe they should”.  Ultimately, you start to feel that they know things you don’t.  This type of analyst is a “fast follower”.

Now pulling back from all this talk, as an analyst I may try to be “objective”.  I may try to forget about these things, and take special notice of the “good things.  Wholesale funding pressures are falling, petrol prices have collapsed, income growth is still strong, and the labour market is still in tight territory.  A little bit of a slowdown is not a bad thing if it helps to clean up the economy.  However, this view is just as wrapped up in subjective feelings – in this case I have heavily devalued the actual evidence of difficulties in the economy, and the fact that a drastic slowdown is never completely in the data till well after the event.  Analysts that suffer in this way are facing “recession fatigue”.

Analysts must try to remember that this inherent biases exist – as by doing so they can help themselves make more objective, and more useful, statements about what is going on in the economy.  Noticing your ideological blindspot will help you to be a better analyst – so don’t hide from it, face it!  If only I knew how 😛

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Matt Nolan

Google takes on time-inconsistency

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In its eternal quest to “not be evil” Google has decided to take on one of the banes of man – himself, and his time-inconsistency.

It is doing this by introducing a new service to gmail.  You can set up this service to significantly increase the transaction cost associated with sending an email when you are drunk!

In the “drunk” state you may think it is a good idea to email your ex girlfriend/boyfriend and say strange things – however, prior to being drunk you may decide that any benefit associated with emailing someone in your drunk state is more than canceled out by the embarrassing phone call the next day.

This feature allows you to increase the cost to writing the email in your drunk state – allowing you to “pre-commit” to not sending embarrassing emails.

With classy features like this you can tell that a genius like Hal Varian is working for them 😉

Matt Nolan

Quote: 6) Vernon Smith – Unconscious optimisation

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Vernon Smith:

That economic agents can achieve efficient outcomes which are not part of their intention was the key principle articulated by Adam Smith, but few outside of the Austrian and Chicago traditions believed it, circa 1956. Certainly I was not primed to believe it, having been raised by a socialist mother, and further handicapped (in this regard) by a Harvard education, but my experimental subjects revealed to me the error in my thinking (emphasis added)

Economists do NOT think that people analyse every decision they make in a pile of analytical detail.  However, economists do believe that the actions that people act within their “interests” – and that this process can be described using mathmatics.  Maths provides a language to describe action – the agents themselves do not need to be able to do the maths.

goonix

Private prisons: National’s policy and “the proper scope of government”

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Today National released their corrections policy, which would allow the private sector to tender for the management of prisons.

Although not a completely ‘new’ concept for New Zealand (Auckland Central Remand Prison was privately run under the last National Government) it nonetheless raises the issue of when is it appropriate for such services to be ‘contracted out’ rather than provided ‘in-house’ by the government.

Hart, Schleifer and Vishny’s “The Proper Scope of Government: Theory and Application to Prisons” asks the question when should a government provide a service in-house, and when should it contract out provision? (Anyone interested in the full article may be able to locate it here).

The authors’ develop a model for asset ownership (in this instance a prison), which can be owned by the private sector, who contract back to the government, or alternatively can be owned outright by the government.

The central finding of the paper is that the private sector has relatively stronger, but seemingly contradictory, incentives to both reduce costs (driven by a profit motive, which comes at the expense of quality) and increase quality (to get a higher price from the government, who is an ongoing buyer of the service). In this instance the quality of a prison entails order in the prison, amenities that prisoners receive and rehabilitation.
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Matt Nolan

Price asymmetry and my bus ticket

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A large debate in economics stems from the idea that there is a price asymmetry in the economy. What this implies is that prices are more flexible in one direction (up or down) then they are in the other direction.

The commonly provided example is petrol prices. People feel that when crude oil rises in price it is passed on immediately, but when it falls in price it takes time for the firm to react and lower petrol prices. This implies that prices are “stickier” downwards, and so the adjustment to two shocks opposite shocks is asymmetric.

Another example is housing. People find it psychologically difficult to accept that the nominal value of their house has fallen, so it tends to be harder for the nominal price to fall than for it to rise.

Now there are a large number of economists that don’t believe these asymmetries exist (I’m in the camp that I think the downward asymmetries are exaggerated). Overall studies have been inconclusive.

Now I think sticky prices exist, but I think we’ve also got an inherent bias to look at cases where they appear to be sticky downwards compared to stick upwards. I was reminded of this when I brought my Gold Pass for the bus in September.

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