For a number of years I’ve been impressed with the wireless credit-card machines with which many European restaurants equip their wait-staff. This substitution saves workers time (and also that of their customers). This technology is now adopted more widely in the U.S. But on this trip I’ve noticed yet another innovation. In several restaurants wait-staff have wireless devices that also . . .
A few weeks ago, we posted an item about an ad executive in Australia named James Hurman who auctioned off his smoking habit, agreeing to pay a steep fine (about $800) for every cigarette he smoked after the auction closed. He wound up selling the contract, he writes, “for NZ $300 [about US $240] to somebody at the agency where . . .
Say you’re hired for a new job. At the end of a four-week training period, your new boss offers you a big bonus to quit right then. Would you stay on the job, or take the money and run? Zappos employees interact on Twitter. Think of it as an employer’s test for whether you’ve come on board for the money . . .
An old adage is that a university is a happy place if the administration provides football for the alumni, parking for the faculty, and sex for the students. I assume that the free market is working well at my university for the students; and the university administration always works hard on football for the alumni: we’re now building a 15,000 . . .
The Society of Labor Economists, a professional organization, gives awards to worthy scholars. One is for lifetime achievement, the other to a scholar who finished his/her education within the past 12 years. The American Economic Association does the same thing. Because most scholars — in economics and most sciences — do their best work while young, all these awards are . . .
I love Chrysler’s new incentive program that guarantees consumers who buy one of their new cars or trucks won’t pay more than $2.99 a gallon at the pump for the first three years they own the vehicle. When you sign up, you get a special credit card that can only be used to buy gas. When you swipe it, $2.99 . . .
No matter what the engineers do, the squirrels still manage to gnaw their way through the garbage bins in my alley. The city keeps coming up with new garbage bins that thwart the squirrels’ previous strategy, but the squirrels just keep coming up with new and better ideas. They used to chew through the lid. So the engineers made the . . .
On the Web site thatsaspicymeatball, you can view the latest comments from MetaFilter (which requires a one-time, $5 membership fee to post a comment) and YouTube (free) side by side. The site’s creator, Bertrand, uses Yahoo Pipes to retrieve comments from the most recent posts on both sites and displays them on one page, which is updated every hour or . . .
Say you’re a talented young athlete. Would you rather be a doctor, a lawyer, or a Malaysian soccer star? Chances are, once you realize how little Malaysians pay their professional soccer players, you’d probably choose one of the first two. And maybe that’s part of the reason Malaysia’s two national squads were both defeated by Singapore in the A.F.C. Cup . . .
Not long ago Dubner and I wrote in our Times column about some innovative approaches to solving big problems. Here is another example: The Victory Project, which pledges to give $1 billion to the first person to solve any of the following problems: 1. Develop a cure for breast cancer. 2. Develop a cure for diabetes. 3. Reduce greenhouse emissions . . .
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 . . .
Why are there so many fake memoirs in the world? The latest is Margaret Seltzer‘s Love and Consequences. (I would link to its Amazon page but, alas, it no longer has an Amazon page.) If you had written a memoir that was, say, 60 percent true, would you try to present it as a memoir or as a novel? If . . .
That’s the clever title of the latest paper from Dean Karlan (one of the founders of StickK.com, who was featured in this New York Times Magazine article yesterday along with my colleague John List) and co-authors Xavier Giné and Jonathan Zinman. The researchers had surveyors approach people on the streets of the Philippines and offer them the opportunity to open . . .
Roland Fryer and Joel Klein are back at it again, trying innovative approaches to help students in the New York City schools learn. Fryer, who is a tenured professor at Harvard, a frequent co-author of mine, and Chief Equality Officer in the New York City school system, was the driving force behind a pilot program now ongoing in New York . . .
We’ve written quite a bit about online identity theft here at Freakonomics. But there’s another form of crime that’s been spreading through the Internet over the past few years: click fraud. As its name suggests, the crime involves clicking on a Web site’s ads repeatedly (or, in some cases, employing a software program to do it) in order to pad . . .
The Wall Street Journal reports on a new World Health Organization study about cigarette smoking around the world. The Journal‘s piece includes data from Euromonitor International about the number of cigarettes sold worldwide by various manufacturers. Here are the numbers of cigarettes sold (in billions) in 2006 by Philip Morris: U.S./Canada: 184 Asia Pacific: 197 Eastern Europe: 229 Western Europe: . . .
We’ve blogged about obesity at length here at Freakonomics. The health economist Eric Finkelstein has been studying the subject for years, and, along with co-author Laurie Zuckerman, has just published a book, The Fattening of America, which analyzes the causes and consequences of obesity in the U.S. Finkelstein agreed to answer our questions about the book. Q: You state that . . .
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 . . .
Not many economists are great teachers. The sorts of skills that get you into graduate school (like getting an “A+” in Advanced Real Analysis) are not highly correlated with being a star at the blackboard. Combine lack of natural talent with weak incentives to teach well at the top research institutions, and the results in the classroom are often not . . .
Vermont may drop D.M.V. fee for organ donors (Earlier) Friends of nuclear power (Earlier) (Earlier) How do food stamps affect obesity? (Earlier) Economists predict where top recruits will play
Apparently, all information on the Web does not want to be free: the Wall Street Journal will not, as has been widely speculated, tear down its paywall entirely. Here’s what new WSJ owner Rupert Murdoch told his paper at Davos: “We are going to greatly expand and improve the free part of the Wall Street Journal online, but there will . . .
Fertility has become a big business in the U.S., with Americans spending up to $3 billion a year on treatments, drugs, and methods aimed at enabling couples to conceive. Discussions of modern infertility have focused on cultural factors like the rising average age of marriage and the influx of women in the workforce, with studies linking it to environmental and . . .
What percentage of Americans believe what they read in the news? (HT: Romenesko) Prague brothel tries new Web-based business model. (Earlier) The latest in incentives to beat chronic oversleeping. Is there a “happiness” quotient to measuring economic benefits?
Most people, given the opportunity, would like to have a say in what other people earn. If someone is nice to me, throw a little extra Christmas bonus their way. If they are rude and surly, how about a 3 percent pay cut? So I find it interesting that the Baseball Writers of America (BBWAA) recently approved a rule which . . .
Last time out, we asked if you’d rather be arrested for embezzlement or prostitution. Your response was overwhelmingly in favor of prostitution. Here’s another choice between two bad options: Would you rather be Conrad Black or Michael Vick? Yesterday, both of them were sentenced to prison terms, Vick for nearly 2 years and Black for 6-1/2 years. (Black’s sentence was . . .
I am wondering if perhaps we should try to enlist John McEnroe to write with us in the future, although I’m sure we couldn’t afford his fee. In this interesting (London) Telegraph article on the reported rise in fixed tennis matches, McEnroe nicely parses the incentives at play for top-ranked players versus lower-ranked players. While lower-ranked players may be willing . . .
Sometimes a good idea is so obvious that you can’t believe no one has made it happen yet. That would seem to be the case with something called the Impair Aware Alcohol Level Indication System. It’s a machine you can put in a bar or restaurant that lets you measure your blood alcohol level so you know if you’re fit . . .
Last Sunday, the New York Giants played the Chicago Bears in football. The point spread on the game favored the Giants by 1.5 points, meaning that if the Giants won by only one point, those who bet on them would lose. Having watched the game myself, I was not at all surprised to receive the following e-mail from a fan . . .
We recently wrote about the use of commitment devices in weight loss, particularly the recent spike in bariatric surgery. While advocates can make a strong argument in favor of the surgery, especially for the morbidly obese, it is obviously a pretty drastic resort. An article in the current Journal of the American Medical Association highlights a far less invasive commitment . . .
Is the U.S. income gap as big as we think? Becker and Posner comment. Is virginity genetically influenced? Japanese company sells “exploding piggy bank” to incentivize saving. Woman named “Unique” arrested. (Earlier)