Are Public Commitments Counterproductive?
…of not following through combined with the potential pride in reaching your goal that provides the key ingredient. Justin Wolfers definitely understood this when he publicly committed on this blog…
…of not following through combined with the potential pride in reaching your goal that provides the key ingredient. Justin Wolfers definitely understood this when he publicly committed on this blog…
…anomaly that is Usain Bolt by Justin Wolfers and Ian Ayres. Usain Bolt: It’s Just Not Normal Who’s the World’s Fastest Runner? How Impressive is Usain Bolt? A Freakonomics Quiz…
…through their teens, but gradually gain interest later. And people get progressively more interested in talking about career+money in their 20s. And so on. And so on. (HT: Justin Wolfers)…
What are the odds of your marriage ending in divorce? This is a risk with some pretty important consequences, but chances are, you don’t have the foggiest idea on how…
…in the natural rate of unemployment in the 1970s and 1980s, which many macroeconomists have researched and written about, but which Wolfers does not mention. He then concludes: When you…
…the annoyance of poor pedagogy. Indeed, some clever students have even argued that surfing has a positive externality — Ayres and Levitt and Wolfers will have better incentives to teach…
…he left it at reciprocity. This was a satisfying outcome, and no doubt his mother will think twice before accusing him of crimes in the future. Justin Wolfers is…
I’ve been enjoying Arthur Brooks‘s musings on the relationship between personal politics and personal happiness. And so I was interested to read an interesting piece in The Times (of London),…
In a short piece in the latest Science journal, about the Promise of Prediction Markets, we provide a short review of the literature on prediction markets — how and why…
…and there’s been a virtual flood of press coverage: 1. A report on a new paper about Google’s internal prediction markets (which Justin Wolfers, one of its authors, previewed here);…
…reauthorized by September 30, 2011, and we can only hope that Congress heeds Haskins’ advice. Wharton professor gets haircut for charity Penn Current – Justin Wolfers, an associate professor…
…as well as scholars whose work you’ve encountered on this blog and elsewhere: Richard Thaler, Justin Wolfers, Dan Hamermesh, Robert Shiller, Orley Ashenfelter, Robert Frank, Avinash Dixit, Alan Kreuger, George…
Another big-time college sports program okays beer sales in the stadium. (HT: Oliver Luck) Sixty leading economists (including Justin Wolfers) weigh in on what’s wrong with our economy and how…
…be ushered in for all. The idea is also being touted by Michigan Democratic Congressman, Rep. Hansen Clarke: So we asked Freakonomics contributor Justin Wolfers what he thought of the…
A few years ago, Wharton economist and Freakonomics contributor Justin Wolfers, along with co-author Joseph Price, published a paper alleging implicit bias among NBA referees. The paper kicked up a…
Photo: Justin Wolfers The author’s cat, Ivan, reading up on Maximum Likelihood Estimation in Stata. BBC News reports that British cat owners are better educated than dog owners: A poll…
…and Wolfers would be to be cautious on this point. My guess is that the individual level results in Table 5 are more believable and will be more robust than…
…(from Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers) indicate that more income makes you happier; then maybe the people in the nations expected to do well in these games are already fairly…
In the last couple of hours, the InTrade prediction markets have moved sharply in favor of the Republican candidate Scott Brown to defeat Martha Coakley in the Massachusetts Senate race….
…answer: yes.) Along the way, we talked to economists including David Card, Betsey Stevenson, and Justin Wolfers, and poked into the market for counterfeit degrees. But let’s say you’re interested…
…it always was—within the same country, the richer are happier and more satisfied with their lives than the poor. Related: Justin Wolfers has written extensively on this blog about happiness….
It may be surprising to learn that one of the leading scholars studying U.S. politics is in fact a Swedish economist. But the advantage of this unusual state of affairs…
…here, when Dubner took on French political scientist Sebastien Roche and his theory that sport causes crime. More recently, Freakonomics contributor Justin Wolfers reported on a study showing that crime…
…to stay rich. Brian Cuban offers further insights. Last week, Justin Wolfers wondered why Belgium seems to have so few celebrities, and he issued you a challenge to name some….
…their home ice to unleash Vancouver’s inner soccer hooligan. This outbreak of violence is consistent with a piece that Justin Wolfers wrote in 2008, on a study looking at public…
Last Friday, our contributor and friend Justin Wolfers decided to have some end-of-the-week fun and run a caption contest for a pretty amusing picture he came across. The response was…
…are Barb Mellers and Don Moore, with an advisory board that includes Daniel Kahneman, Robert Jervis, Scott Armstrong, Michael Mauboussin, Carl Spetzler and Justin Wolfers. It involves a multi-disciplinary effort…
Over at the Big Think, eight young economists weigh in on the future of the profession, including our own Justin Wolfers. Here’s Justin: Specifically, the tools of economics will continue…
Google has substantially bettered the life of just about anyone reading these words. Sometimes Google betters our life in very small ways too. From a recent Justin Wolfers post, I…
Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen draws an intriguing parallel between accusations made by disgraced NBA ex-referee Tim Donaghy, and models of collusion. While David Stern has denied explicit collusion…