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Posts Tagged ‘Joshua Gans’

Should Candidates for AEA Elections Tell Us What They're Thinking?

Joshua Gans is an economist at the University of Toronto. He has appeared on this blog before and, as the author of Parentonomics: An Economist Dad Looks at Parenting, was featured in our podcast “The Economist’s Guide to Parenting.” He has a long-standing interest in the economics of science as well as studies of the economics profession. He is also a long-standing member of the American Economic Association. On that last note, he has written a thoughtful essay that wonders if the candidates standing for AEA elections should be required, or at least encouraged, to be more forthcoming about what they’d stand for if elected.

 

Should We Learn More About AEA Candidates?
By Joshua Gans

It is that time of year when the 18,000 members of the American Economic Association (AEA) receive their ballots to vote for the society’s leadership. I have been voting in AEA elections for 25 years and the information provided is always the same. There is a voting sheet and then a pamphlet listing the bios of each candidate (e.g., significant publications, awards and administrative positions held) and a photo of each (see here). This is not a lot of information to go on. In my younger days, when I had little personal information on the candidates I would choose on their basis of their work, whether they are close to my field of interest (macro vs. micro, theory vs. empirical), and perhaps whether their politics matched my own.

These days I know many of the candidates both professionally and personally, and so now I factor into the equation whether I think they will be good leaders of the AEA. This may be correlated with the information in their bios but it is not a given. Very often I have found those who are less widely known in the public to have thoughtful ideas about the AEA and economics profession. That gives rise to a natural question: should we know more about AEA candidates than is presented to us formally?


"Information Wants to Be Shared"

The Australian economist Joshua Gans, who has shown up on this blog before, has published a new book called Information Wants to Be Shared. It “looks at the struggles facing information content industries — most notably, publishing (books and newspapers) — and examines the underlying economics of those industries.”  Gans and his publisher, HBR Press, are also running a pricing experiment:

HBR eBooks are all DRM-free but, in this case, if someone were to purchase the book (from HBR or from, say, Amazon or Apple), then they will find on the last page a coupon that they can send to a friend. The friend can then buy the book for only $0.99 directing from HBR. In other words, when you share with a friend, your friend gets a great deal. The usual price of the book is $4.99. I have outlined the rationale behind this at my blog Digitopoly. Basically, it is the sort of thing I advocate for information businesses in general.

Predictions?


New Blog Explores Economics of Digital World: Digitopoly

Our friend Joshua Gans, along with some colleagues, has launched a new blog devoted to the economics of digitization called digitopoly.org. Here, in a guest post, he explains the origins of the site, and what it’s all about.
 
Digonomics
By Joshua Gans
Some of the most popular blogs are tech blogs (Gizmodo, Engadget, TechCrunch) or blogs that place a tech perspective on social commentary (e.g., BoingBoing). And, as we know, economics blogs also tend to be popular. What was missing though was a blog devoted to the economics and competitive issues that arise in the digital age. What’s more, thanks to the NBER’s new Program on the Economics of Digitization (funded by the Sloan Foundation), there is a wealth of new research in this area. That’s how we came to setup a blog devoted to digital issues from an economics perspective.