My son took the SSAT exam this past Saturday. And while I was sitting in the Choate athletic facility waiting for him to finish, I remembered that Avinash Dixit and Barry Nalebuff‘s new book, The Art of Strategy, has a great example concerning standardized testing. Game theory is so powerful it can help you figure out the correct answer without . . .
In early December, I spoke at a Yale Law School breakfast on the current financial crisis — focusing on Robert Shiller‘s book, The Subprime Solution. (Several of my earlier posts — here and here — were actually preparation for my presentation.) The first question to Shiller from the audience began: “Lots of my investment-banker friends are saying: Dubai, Shanghai, Mumbai, . . .
Martin Shubik invented a famous game-theory exercise, sometimes called “the dollar auction,” where a teacher auctions off a $20 bill to the highest bidder. Bids have to be in round dollar amounts, but the twist is that both the highest and the second-highest bidder have to pay. When uninitiated students start to play this game, someone rushes to bid $3 . . .
See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die. In “Proposition 8 — The Musical,” Neil Patrick Harris argues “there’s money to be made” — from weddings (and subsequent divorces) if California legalizes same-sex marriage. But my coauthor Jennifer Gerard Brown beat him to the punch. In “Competitive Federalism and the Legislative Incentives to Recognize Same-Sex Marriage” 68 S. CAL. . . .
Like many others, I’ve had a difficult time during this Thanksgiving weekend to get my mind around the tragic trampling of Wal-Mart employee Jdimytai Damour. Did people keep shopping? Did the Valley Stream store make any sales before the police closed it down? Who put up the sign outside the store saying “Blitz Line Starts Here”? The president of a . . .
Photo: Tom Lemo One of the changes that the “Yes We Can” movement has already wrought is a substantial increase in voter registration — particularly in swing states. In Virginia, for example, the number of registered voters increased by almost 10 percent. Since voter-registration lists are also used to construct juror lists, a possible benefit of this registration boost is . . .
Martin Feldstein has written another Wall Street Journal op-ed (here’s an NBER version) extending his idea for stabilizing home prices. Steven Levitt has written about Feldstein’s basic idea before. The basic idea is for the government to provide low-interest loans to mortgage holders in return for mortgage debt: The federal government would offer any homeowner with a mortgage an opportunity . . .
Larry Summers There is a lot of speculation about whether President-elect Barack Obama will choose Larry Summers to be his Treasury Secretary. But some people are openly opposing Summers’s appointment, in part because of controversial comments he made about women in science. It’s a close question, but I’m hoping that Obama appoints Summers. I have three reasons: First, Summers is . . .
In my last post, I focused on what we still don’t know about the causes of the subprime crisis. But here I’ll tell you about six solutions proposed by Robert Shiller in his book The Subprime Solution. (He has also recently published an op-ed in The Washington Post and an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal.) Shiller separates the short-term . . .
I went to an interesting talk yesterday by a University of Chicago law professor named Lior Strahilevitz. Lior has a radical proposal about the “How’s My Driving?” stickers that we often see affixed to the back bumpers of trucks. There is some initial evidence that these placards are “associated with fleet accident reductions ranging from 20 percent to 53 percent.” . . .
Justin Wolfers’s excellent post on Usain Bolt‘s extraordinary 200-meter race mentions in passing that “it is only a fairly recent phenomenon that the 200-meter typically yields a faster average speed than the 100-meter sprint.” We’re living in a topsy-turvy world where the world-record pace is faster on a longer distance than a shorter distance. When Bolt set a new world . . .
The L.A. Times reports on a group claiming that the recent reduction in gas prices was caused by prayer. “If the whole country keeps on praying, we can bring down prices even more — to even less than $2,” says Rocky Twyman, founder of Pray at the Pump. If prayer did cause the price to drop, did it do so . . .
The Celtics’ demolition of the Lakers reminds me that the sport announcers would do well to put more emphasis on “rebound rates.” Like putt probabilities, the rebound rate basically tells you the probability that a team will get the next rebound. Can you answer a fairly simple question: In the NBA if a team misses a shot, what is the . . .
Like many others, I was incredibly jazzed by Tiger’s victory on Monday. But I was frustrated that the commentators routinely failed to mention the putting distance to the hole. It would be nice to know, “It looks like Rocco has a 25-foot putt.” But I, for one, would like commentators to go further and routinely give us information about the . . .
Joshua Gans, (author of the forthcoming Parentonomics), has an interesting post on “data-driven Parenting.” Turns out that there is a cool web service: Trixie Tracker, that allows parents to record and revisit information on sleep, nappy changes, feeding (both breast-milk and solids), medicines, and pumping. Keeping track of your child’s evolving sleeping patterns (via the internet or even your iPhone) . . .
I recently returned from a cool conference in Athens and I was surprised to see the following poster for Silk Cut cigarettes plastered all around the city. Photo: Hetal Thaker, Product Manager-Dimensions, SPSS Inc. We see a bone propping open an alligator’s jaw and a bulldog looking on intently with the slogan “Must-have Silk” written below. The “bone” in the . . .
I had a sobering moment a couple of years ago when I noticed that MSNBC’s recommendation engine predicted that I would enjoy stories about American Idol. It’s a guilty pleasure, but AI is one of the more normal things that I do with my 11-year-old daughter, Anna. So my household is quite happy that (fellow Kansas City area native) David . . .
Dubner’s post on perfectionism reminds me of a parallel phenomenon: People who say that they’re going to be brief often aren’t.
Several years ago I watched a particularly memorable “Law Revue” skit night at Yale. One of the skits had a group of students sitting at desks, facing the audience, listening to a professor drone on. All of the students were looking at laptops except for one, who had a deck of cards and was playing solitaire. The professor was outraged . . .
In 2004, a bunch of newspapers (including the New York Times) instituted a new policy requiring that articles, when possible, should explain the reasons why the paper granted a source anonymity. The new policy has created a great empirical opportunity — because in practice the required reason is given after the phrase: “[source] was granted anonymity because … “. The . . .
For fans of FareCast, there is a cool new site called DelayCast that’s just gone into beta. Type in the airport codes for your departure and arrival cities and the date and site come back with predictions about the probability of cancellation and delay for different airlines serving the route. For example, here are the results for a trip from . . .
My son and I recently returned from Israel where we had the chance to spend Purim in Jerusalem. Purim is a bit like Halloween — kids and parents dress up in costumes. And while there aren’t door-to-door “trick-or-treats,” there is a tradition of giving kids candies. Our cab driver even offered us Purim chocolate. So it was on a beautiful . . .
A few years back, I got interested in taxicab tipping – and what influences how much people tip. So together with Fred Vars and Nasser Zakariya, I collected data on more than 1,000 cab rides in New Haven, CT and crunched the numbers. The study (published in The Yale Law Journal) found — after controlling for a host of other . . .
One of my earliest and happiest memories was being released from a hospital oxygen tent when I was a small child. I had developed pneumonia and was in pretty bad shape. They not only kept me under an oxygen tent for several days at St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City, but they also gave me massive amounts of tetracycline. The . . .
On a wintry night a few weeks ago, I was walking with Aaron Edlin across the Harvard campus when he casually claimed that the “voter’s paradox” wasn’t generally true — that it could be rational for people to vote for purely instrumental reasons. I did a double take, because the chance that my vote will change the result of any . . .
It is devilishly hard to lose weight. A randomized control year-long study looked at the impact of four different diets (Atkins, Ornish, Weight Watchers, and Zone Diets) on a group of overweight and obese subjects who were looking to lose weight. The diets produced only “modest” average weight loss of about 6.4 lbs (2.3 percent of original body weight) and . . .
Justin Wolfers‘s recent post on “sounding presidential” reminded me that there is another sense in which a candidate might sound presidential. It turns out that almost all presidents have had first names with stressed first syllables – think WILL-iam, or RICH-ard. One-syllable names are also stressed when you say the candidate’s entire name – think BILL CLIN-ton or GEORGE BUSH. . . .
Peter Hain has resigned as the U.K.’s Secretary of State for Work and Pensions because he failed to declare “donations to his campaign for the Labour deputy leadership worth more than ?100,000.” But Bruce Ackerman and I think that the campaign disclosure law is misguided, and suggest an alternative in an op-ed that we wrote in The Guardian. Transparency in . . .
A new Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby Poll has Mitt Romney ahead of John McCain by 37 percent to 34 percent in a poll of 1185 likely Republican voters in California (2.9 percent margin of error). But what is the probability that more likely voters in the state actually support Romney? Given the 2.9 percent margin of error, it’s possible that Romney just got . . .
Adam Liptak has an excellent article in the Times that looks at an example of American exceptionalism: the Bail Bond Dealer. This really is a pariah industry. As Liptak put it: Most of the legal establishment, including the American Bar Association and the National District Attorneys Association, hates the bail bond business, saying it discriminates against poor and middle-class defendants, . . .
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