Does file sharing really have no effect on record sales? (Earlier) Four men charged with selling steroids on MySpace. (Earlier) Consultants build a business around “nonverbal cue” coaching. Smaller Volvo marketed to new group of “enlightened consumers”.
Two arrested in “money-making potion” scam. (Hat tip: Consumerist) Are economists incapable of cognitive dissonance? Meteorite crashes in Peru, causes panic. Cigarette merchants sued for selling knockoff Marlboros.
Do restaurants blacklist black customers? (Earlier) Higher emissions standards could give car inspectors more incentives to cheat. New Broadway play puts game theory into action. (Earlier)
Let’s say you discover an old lamp and rub it, and out comes a genie offering to grant you a wish. You are greedy and devious, so you wish for the ability, whenever you play online poker, to see all the cards that the other players are holding. The genie grants your wish. What would you do next? If you . . .
Political scandals are a bit like the weather: there’s always something brewing. But of all the congressmen and senators whose careers have fallen apart in recent years, few have done so as spectacularly as Randall “Duke” Cunningham, the Republican congressman from California who in 2006 was sentenced to eight years and four months in prison after F.B.I. investigators discovered that . . .
Shortly after Brian Jacob and I did our research on teachers who cheat, we thought about starting a company that would provide cheating detection services to schools systems. What I quickly discovered, however, was that there were few things in the world that school systems wanted less than to catch teachers who cheat — suffice it to say that school . . .
See? Even bacteria cheat. (Earlier) Dissed by Oprah: one author’s tale. Global warming hits the fashion industry. (Earlier) Can railroad track layouts show the causal effects of segregation?
Is cheating really so bad, particularly when there’s no punishment involved? Dubner discusses the vote rigging scandal behind the winners of Fishbowl DC’s “Hottest Media Types” contest.
Yesterday, I posted a short piece called “Should We Just Let the Tour de France Dopers Dope Away?” It wasn’t an outright call for legalization of sports doping, but I wanted to put the idea on the table. Well, Joe Lindsey, a contributing writer for Bicycling magazine, wrote in to say that there are a lot of compelling reasons to . . .
Now that virtually every cyclist in the Tour de France has been booted for doping, is it time to consider a radical rethinking of the doping issue? Is it time, perhaps, to come up with a pre-approved list of performance-enhancing agents and procedures, require the riders to accept full responsibility for whatever long-term physical and emotional damage these agents and . . .
Last year we blogged about the fascinating study written by economists Ray Fisman and Ted Miguel analyzing the patterns of parking violations among diplomats to the United Nations in New York. They find that diplomats from high corruption countries have more unpaid parking tickets, as do diplomats from countries that are more anti-American. Armed with that information, try to guess . . .
In their June 10, 2007, column for the New York Times Magazine, Dubner and Levitt present some interesting new research on real estate sales. No, it’s not what you’re thinking: more Realtor bashing! Although it is true that they have written before about the imperfect nature of the Realtor’s commission model, this column takes a somewhat different tack. It’s about a little-known trick known as a cash-back transaction, in which a buyer receives a “rebate” to finance his own down-payment – a rebate that the lending bank never finds out about. This blog post supplies additional research materials.
Itzhak Ben-David is a Ph.D. candidate in finance at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. (Levitt is one of his dissertation advisors.) While pursuing his original research idea — the degree to which housing prices efficiently incorporate anticipated tax increases — Ben-David stumbled upon a slightly juicier topic: a real-estate sleight of hand known as the “cashback transaction,” . . .
Greetings, Freakonomics community! This is your friendly neighborhood web editor, Melissa. Starting today, while Steven and Stephen will continue to post the same high-brow discussions of crack dealing, cheating, gold-digging and online poker that have long graced this site, I’ll also be posting under the eponymous apple/orange. So keep sending your good ideas to levittdubner (at) freakonomics (dot) com. The . . .
I just returned from a fascinating and enjoyable trip to Warsaw. The only negative to the trip (besides the fact it is a 9 hour flight to get there) was how incredibly rude the Poles were about lines. I have never seen such obvious disrespect for other people when it came to cutting in lines, even when it meant that . . .
Last April, we wrote a column about tax cheating. It included a passage about the I.R.S.’s National Research Program, “a three-year study during which 46,000 randomly selected 2001 tax returns were intensively reviewed.” The goal was to determine some of the specifics of tax cheating: what kind of incentives work and don’t work, what kind of people are more likely . . .
A blogger named Ganesh Kulkarni discovered that the commuter trains of Mumbai serve six million passengers daily but the system isn’t equipped to check everyone’s ticket. Instead, Kulkarni writes, ticket agents conduct random ticket checks. This has given rise to a form of cheating that is elegantly called “ticketless travel.” Although it’s probably not very common to get busted for . . .
Here’s an interesting Wall Street Journal article by Carl Bialik (“The Numbers Guy”) on how authors (and their public-relations firms) try to push a book to No. 1 on Amazon.com or Barnes&Noble.com: For $10,000 to $15,000, you, too, can be a best-selling author. New York public-relations firm Ruder Finn says it can propel unknown titles to the top of rankings . . .
Is illegal downloading responsible for the music industry’s woes? Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf say nope. The I.R.S. will give you a pile of money if you help them catch a big tax cheat. Too bad they weren’t this generous with John Szilagyi, who was one of their own. These three guys look pretty thrilled to have produced the first . . .
When Mark Duggan and I wrote our statistical analysis of match rigging in sumo wrestling (which also was featured in Freakonomics), I spent a lot of time digging through translations of Japanese media reports of suspected past match rigging incidents. Almost every prior accusation of match rigging had a common theme: it was always a foreign sumo wrestler at the . . .
According to this story on ESPN.com, Pat Riley is thinking about bringing in some sumo wrestlers to help improve his game. Riley’s hope is that the battering they give him will better prepare Shaq for game conditions. Let’s hope the sumo wrestlers don’t introduce Shaq to the fine art of cheating to lose. As poorly as Shaq shoots free throws, . . .
I hardly ever drive anymore since I moved close to where I work. So whenever I do, the incivility on the roads leaps out at me. People do things in cars they would never do in other settings. Honking. Swearing. Cutting to the front of the line. And that is just my wife. The other drivers are far meaner. One . . .
I met one of (the elder) Richard Daley’s grandsons yesterday. Great guy. At the risk of poisoning a possible friendship, I just had to ask him whether his grandfather really stole the election for Kennedy in 1960 through vote fraud in Chicago. He said no. And I believe him. I once had a research assistant spend a month going through . . .
Tonight (Oct. 7), there is another segment of “Freakonomics Friday” on ABC’s World News Tonight. Last week’s segment was an introduction to Freakonomics that also focused on the book’s cheating-teacher chapter. (It was incredibly well produced: smart and thoughtful and nuanced, which isn’t easy in 2.5 minutes; TV and ideas don’t always mix well but the ABC folks know seem . . .
In Freakonomics, we talk a lot about catching cheaters using data. Based on a newspaper clipping that Stephen Stigler (a well-known professor of statistics at the University of Chicago, author of a wonderful book on the history of statistics, and son of the great Chicago economist George Stigler), there is a long history of using data to catch bad behavior . . .
Should we be surprised? This article comes from a website called InsideHigherEd.com. (I only posted part of the article here, follow the link to see the whole thing. Thanks to Patrick McCusker for providing the link to me.) Cheating Scandal at Virginia An ‘alarmingly large fraction” of the first-year class of economics graduate students at the University of Virginia were . . .
I spend much of my time trying to find cheating where other people don’t suspect it. So when I heard about a strange happening in Powerball — 110 people picking five out of six correctly when statistically you would expect only 4-5 such winners — I began to fantasize about a big cheating scandal. It had the appearance of the . . .