market design

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pages: 282 words: 80,907

Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design by Alvin E. Roth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Build a better mousetrap, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, computer age, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, deferred acceptance, desegregation, Dutch auction, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, High speed trading, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, law of one price, Lyft, market clearing, market design, medical residency, obamacare, PalmPilot, proxy bid, road to serfdom, school choice, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, two-sided market, uber lyft, undersea cable

When there aren’t enough kidneys to go around (and there aren’t) or seats in the best public schools (there never are), scarce resources must be allocated by some kind of matching process. Market Design Sometimes a matching process, whether formal or ad hoc, evolves over time. But sometimes, especially recently, it is designed. The new economics of market design brings science to matchmaking, and to markets generally. That’s what this book is about. Along with a handful of colleagues around the world, I’ve helped create the new discipline of market design. Market design helps solve problems that existing marketplaces haven’t been able to solve naturally. Our work gives us new insights into what really makes “free markets” free to work properly.

The new system, in contrast, makes it safe for parents to list their true preferences and frees them to think about which schools they actually like best, without having to decide which one school they’re prepared to gamble on. Every market has a story to tell. Stories about market design often begin with failure—failure to provide thickness, to ease congestion, or to make participation safe and simple. In many of the stories in this book, market designers are like firefighters who come to the rescue when a market has failed and try to redesign a marketplace, or design a new one, that will restore order. But markets can succeed on their own practical terms and still fail in the eyes of those who don’t or won’t participate in them.

The economic world is just as full of surprising detail as the natural world, and markets also often arise by a kind of evolution, by trial and error, without any intelligent design. But markets can also be designed, sometimes from scratch but often after trial and error leads to a market failure. Much of what we’ve learned about market design—and from market design about markets more generally—has come from observing market failures and figuring out how to fix them. Not all markets grow like weeds; some, like hothouse orchids, need to be nurtured. And some carefully nurtured marketplaces on the Internet are now among the world’s biggest and fastest-growing businesses.


pages: 350 words: 103,988

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, classic study, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, Dutch auction, electricity market, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, first-price auction, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, John Harrison: Longitude, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, lone genius, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, means of production, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, ought to be enough for anybody, pez dispenser, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, proxy bid, purchasing power parity, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, search costs, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Stewart Brand, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, War on Poverty, world market for maybe five computers, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, yield management

It is by spontaneous change, for the most part, that the rules of the market game develop, with the market participants designing better ways to transact. (I will refer to this aspect of market design as informal or bottom-up.) However, lowering transaction costs is a task not only for entrepreneurs, but also for public policy. The government has the responsibility to establish and maintain an environment within which markets can work efficiently. (I will refer to this aspect of market design as formal or top-down.) A basic part of the government’s role in market design is the defining of property rights. The surest way to destroy a market is to undermine people’s belief in the security of their own property.

There are gains from trade, and people are relentless in finding ways to realize them. From fine art to finance, from eBay’s online auctions to the Rwandan refugee-camp commerce, new markets are continually being built from the bottom up. Entrepreneurs, restlessly thinking up more efficient ways of transacting, play the part of market designers. It is not just entrepreneurs who act as market designers. Market design also comes from the top down, with the government taking the lead—sometimes, as we will see next, driven by pressure from their constituents. THREE He Who Can’t Pay Dies A horrifying AIDS epidemic engulfed Africa toward the end of the twentieth century.

In understanding the breakdown of the California electricity market, the blame need not be placed on the fact that the market designers were in the public sector. The private sector is equally prone to market design mishaps. Trial and error is the usual way for most markets to develop: learning from errors is the chief way of correcting any design flaws. Of the companies offering novel methods for online buying and selling that were floated in the late 1990s, for example, a few prospered but most perished. The internet industry shakeout of 2000–2001 winnowed out the less promising online marketers. The difference between public sector and private sector market design is that the government’s exercises can be on a very large scale and are carried out in the glare of news media, so when things go wrong, we hear about it.


pages: 662 words: 180,546

Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown by Philip Mirowski

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Adam Curtis, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, asset-backed security, bank run, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, blue-collar work, bond market vigilante , bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, capital controls, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, constrained optimization, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt deflation, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disinformation, do-ocracy, Edward Glaeser, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, incomplete markets, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, joint-stock company, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, l'esprit de l'escalier, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, loose coupling, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, Nash equilibrium, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, prediction markets, price mechanism, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, school choice, sealed-bid auction, search costs, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, Steven Levy, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Myth of the Rational Market, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, working poor

They have almost always directed the pitch at cash-strapped governments, urging them in particular to sell off public assets to private oligopolistic concerns; in the case of toxic asset auctions one need only invert the logic. Unfortunately, no one could much be bothered to scrutinize the claims of market designers. After all, there was a crisis a-brewing. Only a relatively small coterie of market designers ever got invited to participate in market design exercises, and most were partners in a small set of firms with interlocking directorates. In the case of the toxic asset auctions, the job of judging the proposals was assigned to Jeremy Bulow and Paul Milgrom, both partners with Ausubel and Cramton in Market Design, Inc. So much for Chinese Walls and plausible deniability. It doesn’t verge on the wildly conspiratorial to suggest that such arrangements create some perverse incentives when it comes to reining in some of the more fantastical claims (gaining popular acceptance for them improves the firm’s prospects), a fact that has seemed only to encourage ever more extravagant claims: The crisis was caused by mispricing: investment bankers were able to sell poor securities for full value based on misleading ratings.

In particular the housing bubble would have been much less, and the investment bankers would not have been able to make such clever use of the rating agencies and create tens-of-thousands of senseless securities obfuscating prices. Even a tiny bit of good market design would have averted the financial crisis by preventing its root cause: the sale of subprime mortgages as near-riskless securities.143 . . . Calls for sensible regulation and market design were met with condescension before the credit crisis, a condescension that is being reevaluated now.144 Good auction design in complex environments . . . requires exploiting the substantial advances that we have seen in market design over the last fifteen years. The recent financial crisis is another example where the principles of market design, if effectively harnessed by regulators, could have prevented or at least mitigated the crisis.145 Of course, there is no record of any market designers having actually successfully intervened to prevent the crisis, or helped anyone else to ameliorate it, but historical accuracy was never the name of the game.

Ausubel and Cramton (“No Substitute for the ‘P’-Word in Financial Rescue,” p. 1) repeat the “suitcase approach” charge. 137 “Complicated Reverse Auction May Aid in Bailout,” NPR, October 10, 2008. 138 Ausubel and Cramton, “A Troubled Asset Reverse Auction,” p. 10. 139 And, indeed, the studies that Ausubel and Cramton draw upon to get their 97 percent figure (Kagel and Levin, “Implementing Efficient Multi-Object Auction Institutions”) provided experimental treatments of private value auctions. 140 Matthew Philips, “Gaming the Financial System,” Newsweek, November 18, 2008, available at www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/11/17/gaming-the-financial-system.html. 141 Lawrence Ausubel and Peter Cramton, “Auction Design for the Rescue Plan,” presentation dated October 5, 2008, available at www.cramton.umd.edu/papers2005-2009/ausubel-cramton-auction-for-rescue-plan-slides.pdf (accessed March 6, 2012). 142 Nik-Khah, “A Tale of Two Auctions.” 143 Cramton, “Auctioning the Digital Dividend,” p. 1. 144 “The Credit Crisis and Market Design,” Alvin Roth’s Market Design Blog, January 3, 2009, at http://marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2009/01/credit-crisis-and-market-design.html. 145 Cramton, “Market Design,” p. 2. 146 Session on “Research Funding for Economists.” See www.etnpconferences.net/sea/seaarchive/sea2011/User/Program.php?TimeSlot=4#Session11. 147 Prasch, “After the Crash of 2008,” p. 161. 148 Sorkin, Too Big to Fail, pp. 227–29; Calomiris and Wallison, “Blame Fannie Mae and Congress for the Credit Mess.” 149 Krugman, “Fannie, Freddie and You.” 150 White, “The Federal Reserve System’s Influence on Research in Monetary Economics”; Wallison, see all; Congleton, “On the Political Economy of the Financial Crisis and Bailout 2008–9”; Calabria, “Fannie, Freddie and the Subprime Mortgage Market”; Pinto, “ACORN and the Housing Bubble”; Paybarah, “Bloomberg: Plain and Simple.” 151 Nocera, “The Big Lie.” 152 For the best examples, consult Engel and McCoy, The Subprime Virus; Muolo and Padilla, Chain of Blame; Fligstein and Goldstein, “A Long Strange Trip”; Avery and Brevoort, “The Subprime Crisis”; Madrick and Partnoy, “Did Fannie Cause the Disaster?”


pages: 252 words: 73,131

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

These allocation problems all now have centralized clearinghouses, many designed with the basic deferred acceptance algorithm as their foundations. But that’s really all that Gale and Shapley provided: a conceptual framework that market designers have, for several decades now, been applying, evaluating, and refining. They’ve learned from its successes and, unfortunately, learned even more from its inevitable failures: modeling real-life exchanges is an imprecise, iterative process in which many of us find ourselves as experimental subjects. The Complicated Job of Engineering Matches Market designer Al Roth likes to use a bridge-building metaphor to explain the contrast between his own work and that of design pioneers like Shapley.

When he went to work for the Department of Education’s central administration, hired by the reform-minded schools chancellor Joel Klein, he found himself part of a group tasked with resuscitating New York’s ailing school assignment process. At around the same time Dorosin and his colleagues were consulting with market design experts on fixing the situation in New York, school officials in Boston had started to look at market design as a solution to their own school-match woes—although the Boston school system only had a slight headache compared to NYC’s cardiac arrest. A mechanism design expert at Boston College, Tayfun Sönmez, had been hounding the city’s school board for years with proposals on how to improve student assignments using a match based on deferred acceptance.

Indeed, their simulations indicated that just as many students would have been assigned to nearby schools if there had been no walk zone priority at all. Why did this happen? The explanation is subtle, so bear with us for just a moment. But its subtlety can also help you appreciate why market designers may have missed it on first pass. In putting Gale and Shapley’s algorithm into practice, students ranked each school. The market designers thought of district priorities as being like schools’ rankings of students. So just as each girl in the middle-school gym would have her suitors line up in order, a school would accept each child in order of priority based on school zone, income, and so forth.


pages: 288 words: 16,556

Finance and the Good Society by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Roth, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computer age, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, full employment, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, loss aversion, Louis Bachelier, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market design, means of production, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, passive investing, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, profit maximization, quantitative easing, random walk, regulatory arbitrage, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social contagion, Steven Pinker, tail risk, telemarketer, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Market for Lemons, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Chapter 8 Market Designers and Financial Engineers Market designers, sometimes called mechanism designers, start with a problem—the need for a market solution to some real human quandary—and then design a market and associated contracts to solve the problem. They are using nancial and economic theory to create “trades” that leave people better o . In so doing they are humanizing nance and making it more relevant to human welfare. Sometimes these people are called nancial engineers, since what they do seems analogous to what mechanical or electrical engineers do. At their best, market designers have the same practical common sense and drive to create, and the same grasp of basic science, that successful engineers have.

Even so, the limits of Roth’s kidney transplant market are still apparent today, for such markets have not reached most of the people in need of transplants. The slowness with which nancial developments take place again re ects a demand for conventionality and familiarity and an overreliance on tradition, both of which continue to inhibit financial innovation. The Variety of Market Design Objectives Market design is becoming a lively eld. There are now, for example, mechanisms in place to help reduce the problem of global warming in an e cient manner, internalizing (making the emitters of greenhouse gases pay for) the damage they cause by contributing to global warming. The “cap and trade” system forces producers of CO2 emissions to buy permits to emit, as measured in certi ed emission reduction (CER) units, on an open market.

Governments would promise to buy and distribute for free drugs for major diseases, thereby creating market forces to motivate private enterprise to nd drugs that would cure the diseases.2 Ronnie Horesh has proposed “social policy bonds,” issued by governments, that would pay out more if certain social policy objectives were met, thereby creating a nancial incentive for free-market participants to buy the bonds and then figure out how to meet the objectives.3 Market-Design Solutions to Even the Most Personal Problems To appreciate the importance of market design, and how it can really contribute to the good society, it is helpful to think of a very personal problem that creates untold anxiety, yet for which a mechanism can be designed. Consider nding a mate, someone to live with in a close relationship, usually as husband and wife.


pages: 119 words: 10,356

Topics in Market Microstructure by Ilija I. Zovko

Brownian motion, computerized trading, continuous double auction, correlation coefficient, financial intermediation, Gini coefficient, information asymmetry, market design, market friction, market microstructure, Murray Gell-Mann, p-value, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, transaction costs

., almost all trade volume concentrated in one order) on the buy (bid) side, unless balanced by a similarly heterogenous sell (ask) side of the market, produces an imbalance which drives prices up, and vice versa. This effect is preset on both daily and hourly timescales. We show that a quotation market design (off-book or upstairs market), as opposed to a limit order design (on-book or downstairs market), helps limit the price impact of large orders causing the heterogeneity but does not remove it completely. In addition, the impact of a large order is limited in case the trading is done against similarly large orders, regardless of the market design. This fact seems to be at odds with the interpretation of information content of trades, and we propose it may be more liquidity that determines the impact of an order.

At the LSE, the on-book session is called the SETS (Stock Exchange Electronic Trading System), and the off-book session the SEAQ (Stock Exchange Automated Quotation System). The papers contained in the first two chapters of the thesis focus only on the limit order trade process and use only the on-book data. The last two chapters use also the off-book data and provide a comparison in some aspects of the two market designs. 1.1.1 Trading day For the FTSE 100 stocks, the on-book trading session starts at 8:50 with a 10 minute opening auction. During the auction traders place orders to buy and sell but no execution takes place. Orders are differentiated by their execution priority. For example, limit orders are executed depending on their distance from the resulting clearing price while market orders take priority in execution.

We also find that the time series of relative limit prices show interesting temporal structure, characterized by an autocorrelation function that asymptotically decays as C(τ ) ∼ τ −0.4 . Furthermore, relative limit price levels are positively correlated with and are led by price volatility. We speculate that this feedback may potentially contribute to clustered volatility. In Chapter 3 (Farmer et al., 2005) we turn our attention to market design and investigate a situation where the constraints imposed by market institutions may dominate strategic behavior of agents. We use the LSE limit order book data to test a simple model in which minimally intelligent agents place orders to trade at random. The model treats the statistical mechanics of order placement, price formation, and the accumulation of revealed supply and demand within the context of the continuous double auction, and yields simple laws relating order arrival rates to statistical properties of the market.


pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

Economic knowledge certainly accumulates. If we had not learned lessons from the experience of the 1930s, the consequences of the 2008–9 financial crisis would have been far more severe, and governments would not have introduced furlough schemes during the coronavirus lockdowns. If we had not created and learned from market design (defining the rules that make markets work well), far fewer of the apps on our phones could work. There are other important differences between economics and its critics. One is whether it is ever acceptable to put monetary values on intrinsically good things like nature or human life. The economists’ answer is that there are implicit valuations made whenever people make choices about where to build roads or what safety features to require of new products, so is it not better to be explicit about those judgements?

If the evidence suggests an active government role, economists will recommend it; and indeed in the decade since the GFC there has been a widespread shift in sentiment in this direction. Whatever you think about the approach, the idea of the ‘nudge’, whereby policies recognise psychological realities such as inertia or the effect of how people’s choices are ‘framed’, is one example of a new interventionism. Market design is a vibrant area of economics combining market processes with the deliberate shaping of the rules by which they operate, used in policy areas such as auctions of government bonds or radio spectrum. The experience of the Covid19 pandemic has made massive government economic intervention a reality anyway.

He argues for excluding medicine from the market—should only the rich be able to buy a kidney or heart? Most Britons, devoted to the more or less free-to-use National Health Service (NHS), agree. Here, though, the difference between values and processes is relevant. Economics Nobel Prize winner Al Roth—someone who has given much thought to what he describes as ‘repugnant’ markets—designed a kidney exchange; no money changes hands, yet it is organised as a market matching suppliers and users. Within just a few years of his innovation, thirty people in New England had received kidneys—without putting a price on them—through this market (Roth, Sönmez, and Ünver 2004; Roth 2007).9 By now, thousands of people around the world have benefited.


pages: 226 words: 59,080

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science by Dani Rodrik

airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, bank run, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bretton Woods, business cycle, butterfly effect, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, distributed generation, Donald Davies, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial deregulation, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, fudge factor, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidity trap, loss aversion, low skilled workers, market design, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, oil shock, open economy, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, price elasticity of demand, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, risk/return, Robert Shiller, school vouchers, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, unorthodox policies, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, white flight

Three sets of economic ideas in three different areas: the world economy, urban transport, and the fight against poverty. In each case, economists remade part of our world by applying simple economic frameworks to public problems. These examples represent economics at its best. There are many others: Game theory has been used to set up auctions of airwaves for telecommunications; market design models have helped the medical profession assign residents to hospitals; industrial organization models underpin competition and antitrust policies; and recent developments in macroeconomic theory have led to the widespread adoption of inflation targeting policies by central banks around the world.1 When economists get it right, the world gets better.

The theory of auctions, drawing on abstract game theory, is virtually impenetrable even to many economists.†† Yet it produced the principles used by the Federal Communications Commission to allocate the nation’s telecommunications spectrum to phone companies and broadcasters as efficiently as possible, while raising more than $60 billion for the federal government.18 Models of matching and market design, equally mathematical, are used today to assign residents to hospitals and students to public schools. In each case, models that seemed to be highly abstract and to have few connections with the real world turned out to have useful applications many years later. The good news is that, contrary to common perception, math for its own sake does not get you far in the economics profession.

Arthur, 32–33 “Life among the Econ” (Leijonhufvud), 9–10 Lincoln, Abraham, 52 Lipsey, Richard, 59 liquidity, 134–35, 155, 185 liquidity traps, 130 locational advantages, 108 London, England, congestion pricing and, 3 Lucas, Robert, 130, 131–32, 134–36 “Machiavelli’s Mistake: Why Good Laws Are No Substitute for Good Citizens” (Bowles), 71n macroeconomics, 39–40, 87, 102, 107, 143, 157n, 181 business cycles and, 125–37 capital flow and, 165–66 classical questions of, 101 demand-side view of, 128–30, 136–37 globalization and, 165–66 Madison, James, 187 Mäki, Uskali, 22n malaria, randomized testing and, 106, 204 Malthus, Thomas, 118 Manchester University, 197 Mankiw, Greg, 149, 150, 171n, 197 manufacturing: economic growth and, 163–64 exchange rate and, 100, 163 income inequality and, 141 marginal costs, 121, 122 marginalist economics, 119–22 marginal productivity, 120–21, 122–25 marginal utility, 121, 122 Mariel boatlift (1980), 57 market design models, 5 “Market for ‘Lemons’, The” (Akerlof), 69n market fundamentalism, 160, 178 markets: asymmetric information in, 68–69, 70, 71 behavioral economics and, 69–71, 104–7, 202–4 economic models and, see models economics courses and, 198 economists’ bias toward, 169–71, 182–83 efficiency in, xiii, 14, 21, 34, 48, 50, 51, 67, 98, 125, 147, 148, 150, 156–58, 161, 165, 170, 192–95, 196 general-equilibrium interactions in, 41, 56–58, 69n, 91, 120 in Great Recession, 156–59 imperfectly competitive types of, 67–69, 70, 136, 150, 162 incentives in, 7, 170, 172, 188–92 institutions and, 98, 161, 202 likely outcomes in, 17–18 multiple equilibria in, 16–17 perfectly competitive types of, 21, 27, 28, 47, 69n, 71, 122, 180 prisoners’ dilemma in, 14–15, 20, 21, 61–62, 187, 200 self-interest in, 21, 104, 158, 186–88, 190 social cooperation in, 195–96 supply and demand in, 13–14, 20, 99, 119, 122, 128–30, 136–37, 170 values in, 186–96 Washington Consensus and, 159–67, 169 Marshall, Alfred, 13n, 32, 119 “Marshallian Cross Diagrams and Their Uses before Alfred Marshall: The Origins of Supply and Demand Geometry” (Humphrey), 13n Marx, Groucho, 26 Marx, Karl, xi, 31, 116, 118 Massachusetts, University of (Amherst), 77 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 107, 108, 165, 206 mathematical economics, 35 mathematical optimization, 30, 101, 202–3 mathematics: economic models and, 29–37, 47 social sciences and, 33–34 Maxwell’s equations, 66n Meade, James, 58 methodological individualism, 181 Mexico: antipoverty programs in, 3–4, 105–6 globalization and, 141, 166 microeconomics, 125–26, 131 microfounded models, 101 Miguel, Ted, 106–7 Milan, Italy, congestion pricing and, 3 Milgrom, Paul, 36n minimum wages, employment and, 17–18, 28n, 114, 115, 124, 143, 150, 151 Minnesota, University of, 131 Mishel, Lawrence, 124n models: authority and criticism of, 76–80 big data and, 38–39, 40 causal factors and, 40–41, 85–86, 99–100, 114–15, 179, 184, 200, 201, 204 coherent argument and clarity in, 80–81 common sense in, 11 comparative advantage principle and, 52–55, 58n, 59–60, 139, 170 compensation for risk and, 110 computers and, 38, 41 contextual truth in, 20, 174 contingency and, 25, 145, 173–74, 185 coordination and, 16–17, 42, 200 critical assumptions in, 18, 26–29, 94–98, 150–51, 180, 183–84, 202 criticisms of, 10–11, 178, 179–85 decision trees and, 89–90, 90 diagnostic analysis and, 86–93, 90, 97, 110–11 direct implications and, 100–109 dual economy forms of, 88 efficient-markets hypothesis and, 156–58 empirical method and, xii, 7, 46, 65, 72–76, 77–78, 137, 173–74, 183, 199–206 endogenous growth types of, 88 experiments compared with, 21–25 fables compared with, 18–21 field experiments and, 23–24, 105–8, 173, 202–5 general-equilibrium interactions and, 41, 56–58, 69n, 91, 120 goods and services and, 12 Great Recession and, 155–59 horizontal vs. vertical development and, 64n, 67, 71 hypotheses and, 46, 47–56 imperfectly competitive markets and, 67–69, 70, 136, 150, 162 incidental implications and, 109–11 institutions and, 12, 98, 202 intuition and, 46, 56–63 Keynesian types of, 40, 88, 101, 102, 127–30, 131, 133–34, 136–37 knowledge and, 46, 47, 63–72 main elements of, 31 mathematics and, 29–37, 47 neoclassical types of, 40, 88, 90–91, 121, 122 new classical approach to, 130–34, 136–37 parables and, 20 partial-equilibrium analysis and, 56, 58, 91 perfectly competitive markets and, 21, 27, 28, 47, 69n, 71, 122, 180 predictability and, 26–28, 38, 40–41, 85, 104, 105, 108, 115, 132, 133, 139–40, 184–85, 202 principle-agent types of, 155 questions and, 114–16 rationality postulate and, 202–3 real world application of, 171–72 rules of formulation in, 199–202 scale economy vs. local advantage in, 108 scientific advances by progressive formulations of, 63–72 scientific character of, 45–81 second-best theory and, 58–61, 163–64, 166 selection of, 83–112, 136–37, 178, 183–84, 208 simplicity and specificity of, 11, 179–80, 210 simplicity vs. complexity of, 37–44 social reality of, 65–67, 179 static vs. dynamic types of, 68 strategic interactions and, 61–62, 63 of supply and demand, 3, 13–14, 20, 99, 119, 122, 128–30, 136–37 theories and, 113–45 time-inconsistent preferences in, 62–63 tipping points arising from, 42 in trade agreements, 41 unrealistic assumptions in, 25–29, 180–81 validity of, 23–24, 66–67, 112 variety of, 11, 12–18, 26, 68, 72, 73, 114, 130, 198, 202, 208, 210 verbal vs. mathematical types of, 34 verification in selection of, 93–112 see also economics; macroeconomics; markets “Models Are Experiments, Experiments are Models” (Mäki), 22n monetary policies, 87 monopolies, 161 in imperfectly competitive markets, 67–68 in perfectly competitive markets, 122 price controls and, 28, 94–97, 150 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de, 196 mortality rates, 206 mortgage-backed securities, 155 mortgage finance, 39, 155 mosquito nets, randomized testing of, 106, 204 “Mr.


pages: 139 words: 35,022

Roads and Bridges by Nadia Eghbal

AGPL, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, Debian, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, GnuPG, Guido van Rossum, Ken Thompson, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, leftpad, Marc Andreessen, market design, Network effects, platform as a service, pull request, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software is eating the world, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Tragedy of the Commons, Y Combinator

From a functional perspective, the vast majority of open source contributors are developers, but plenty of other roles are needed to sustain larger projects, including writing, project management, and outreach. Open source projects are not dissimilar from other types of organizations, including startups, where administration, marketing, design, and other roles are needed to support an organization’s raw output. It is partially because open source culture is so heavily weighted to developers that sustainability is rarely discussed or acted upon. Finally, the homogeneity of open source contributors impacts diversity efforts in technology at large, because it is so closely tied to hiring.

Digital infrastructure is distributed across hundreds of projects, large and small, built by individuals, groups and companies; it would be a behemoth task to catalog them all. It's hard to find funding...for the average developer (me) some of them are totally out of reach. [Kickstarter] only works if you either go viral or hire someone to do all of the marketing/design/promotions….Turning a project into a business is great too, but...these are all things that take away from development (which is the part I like to focus on). If I wanted to get a grant, I wouldn't even know where to start.[149] - Kyle Kemp, freelance developer and open source contributor Institutional efforts to support digital infrastructure There are some institutional efforts to collectively organize and help support open source projects.


pages: 267 words: 72,552

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Of course, the cost of not always achieving maximum overall welfare is a small price to pay in return for the vast relative improvement that we get through the individual matching processes, thanks to the shift to data-richness. However, for some very specific types of transactions, especially those that have huge consequences beyond the immediate transaction partners (economists call this “externalities”), we may want to apply lessons from existing markets that must function without price. They work through clever market design combined with a different type of matching algorithm. Think, for example, of choosing which patient gets a donor kidney. Donor kidneys aren’t sold (at least legally, although some economists have suggested they should be), so preferences can’t be condensed and simplified into a stated price. In such markets, a central clearinghouse often collects preference information from all market participants and uses advanced matching algorithms to connect suitable market participants to transact.

We foresee a time when one marketplace after another will reinvent itself using the advances in technology and the concepts we have outlined. The change is already under way. But it won’t be a simple, swift, or linear transition. As marketplaces are innovating, they will have to experiment to discover the right combination of technology and market design that suits the needs of their participants. But once a money-based marketplace has turned itself into a data-rich one, a marketplace built on multidimensional information streams, enhanced by preference-matching algorithms and machine learning, there will be no turning back. We can already see such a development unfold in a market that serves as a guinea pig for reinvention—the market for love.

Roth and Elliott Peranson, “The Redesign of the Matching Market for American Physicians: Some Engineering Aspects of Economic Design,” American Economic Review 89, no. 4 (September 1999), 748–780. two of the world’s leading experts in matching: Alvin E. Roth, Who Gets What—and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015); see also David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee, Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms (Cambridge: Harvard Business Review Press, 2016). algorithm predicted which team would win: Tim Adams, “Job Hunting Is a Matter of Big Data, Not How You Perform at an Interview,” Observer, May 10, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/may/10/job-hunting-big-data-interview-algorithms-employees; Sue Tabbitt, “Forget Myers-Briggs: Algorithms Can Better Predict Team Chemistry,” Guardian, May 27, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2016/may/27/forget-myers-briggs-algorithms-predict-team-chemistry.


pages: 272 words: 83,798

A Little History of Economics by Niall Kishtainy

Alvin Roth, behavioural economics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dr. Strangelove, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, first-price auction, floating exchange rates, follow your passion, full employment, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, loss aversion, low interest rates, market clearing, market design, means of production, Minsky moment, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

Even though it doesn’t involve buying and selling, kidney exchange is like a market in the sense that it allows people to swap things with each other. When Roth set up his database and computer programmes he created something similar to a market where none existed before. It’s an example of a new field of economics known as ‘market design’. Most of us will never need to get hold of a kidney, of course. A really famous example of market design – one to do with the mobile phones in our pockets – affects many more of us, and in contrast to kidney exchange it involved buyers paying huge sums of money to sellers. In the 1990s and 2000s, governments hired economists to help sell licences to companies who wanted to use the radio spectrum to set up mobile phone networks.

(i), (ii) Kerala (India) (i) Keynes, John Maynard (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) Keynesian theory (i), (ii), (iii) Klemperer, Paul (i) Krugman, Paul (i), (ii) Kydland, Finn (i), (ii) labour (i) in ancient Greece (i) and market clearing (i) women as unpaid (i) labour theory of value (i), (ii) laissez-faire (i) landowners (i), (ii), (iii) Lange, Oskar (i) law of demand (i), (ii) leakage of spending (i) Lehman Brothers (i) leisure class (i) leisured, women as (i) Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (i), (ii) Lerner, Abba (i) Lewis, Arthur (i) Lincoln, Abraham (i) List, Friedrich (i) loss aversion (i) Lucas, Robert (i), (ii) MacKay, Charles (i) Macmillan, Harold (i) macro/microeconomics (i) Malaysia, and speculators (i) Malthus, Thomas (i), (ii), (iii) Malynes, Gerard de (i), (ii) manufacturing (i), (ii) division of labour (i) see also Industrial Revolution margin (i) marginal costs (i), (ii) marginal principle (i), (ii), (iii) marginal revenue (i) marginal utility (i), (ii) market, the (i) market clearing (i) market design (i) market failure (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) ‘Market for Lemons, The’ (Akerlof) (i) market power (i) markets, currency (i), (ii) Marshall, Alfred (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Marx, Karl (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) Marxism (i) mathematics (i), (ii), (iii) means of production (i) mercantilism (i), (ii) Mesopotamia (i) Mexico, pegged currency (i) micro/macroeconomics (i) Microsoft (i) Midas fallacy (i) minimum wage (i) Minsky, Hyman (i) Minsky moment (i), (ii) Mirabeau, Marquis de (i), (ii), (iii) Mises, Ludwig von (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) mixed economies (i), (ii) Mobutu Sese Seko (i) model villages (i) models (economic) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) modern and traditional economies (i), (ii) monetarism (i) monetary policy (i), (ii) money (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) see also coins; currency money illusion (i) money wages (i) moneylending see usury monopolies (i), (ii) monopolistic competition (i), (ii) monopoly, theory of (i) monopoly capitalism (i), (ii), (iii) monopsony (i) moral hazard (i), (ii) multiplier (i) Mun, Thomas (i), (ii), (iii) Muth, John (i) Nash, John (i), (ii) Nash equilibrium (i) national income (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) National System of Political Economy (List) (i) Nelson, Julie (i) neoclassical economics (i) net product (i) Neumann, John von (i) New Christianity, The (Saint-Simon) (i) new classical economics (i) New Harmony (Indiana) (i) New Lanark (Scotland) (i) Nkrumah, Kwame (i), (ii) non-rival good (i) Nordhaus, William (i), (ii) normative economics (i), (ii) Obstfeld, Maurice (i) Occupy movement (i) oligopolies (i) opportunity cost (i), (ii) organ transplant (i) output per person (i) Owen, Robert (i) paper money (i), (ii) Pareto, Vilfredo (i) pareto efficiency (i), (ii) pareto improvement (i) Park Chung-hee (i) partial equilibrium (i) pegged exchange rate (i) perfect competition (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) perfect information (i) periphery (i) phalansteries (i) Phillips, Bill (i) Phillips curve (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) physiocracy (i), (ii) Pigou, Arthur Cecil (i), (ii), (iii) Piketty, Thomas (i), (ii), (iii) Plato (i), (ii), (iii) policy discretion (i) Ponzi, Charles (i) Ponzi finance (i) population and food supply (i), (ii), (iii) of women (i) positive economics (i) poverty (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) in Cuba (i) Sen on (i) and utopian thinkers (i) Prebisch, Raúl (i) predicting (i) Prescott, Edward (i), (ii) price wars (i), (ii) primary products (i) prisoners’ dilemma (i) private costs and benefits (i) privatisation (i) productivity (i), (ii), (iii) profit (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and capitalism (i), (ii) proletariat (i), (ii) property (private) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) and communism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) protection (i), (ii), (iii) provisioning (i) public choice theory (i) public goods (i) quantity theory of money (i) Quesnay, François (i) Quincey, Thomas de (i), (ii) racism (i) Rand, Ayn (i) RAND Corporation (i), (ii) rate of return (i), (ii) rational economic man (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) rational expectations (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) real wages (i), (ii), (iii) recession (i) and governments (i), (ii), (iii) Great Recession (i) Keynes on (i), (ii) Mexican (i) redistribution of wealth (i) reference points (i) relative poverty (i) rent on land (i), (ii), (iii) rents/rent-seeking (i) resources (i), (ii) revolution (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Cuban (i) French (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Russian (i), (ii) Ricardo, David (i), (ii), (iii) risk aversion (i) Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek) (i) robber barons (i) Robbins, Lionel (i) Robinson, Joan (i) Roman Empire (i) Romer, Paul (i) Rosenstein-Rodan, Paul (i) Roth, Alvin (i), (ii) rule by nature (i) rules of the game (i) Sachs, Jeffrey (i) Saint-Simon, Henri de (i) Samuelson, Paul (i), (ii) savings (i), (ii) and Say’s Law (i) Say’s Law (i) scarcity (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) Schumpeter, Joseph (i), (ii) sealed bid auction (i) second price auction (i) Second World War (i) securitisation (i) self-fulfilling crises (i) self-interest (i) Sen, Amartya (i), (ii) missing women (i), (ii), (iii) services (i) shading bids (i), (ii) shares (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) see also stock market Shiller, Robert (i), (ii) signalling (i) in auctions (i) Smith, Adam (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) social costs and benefits (i) Social Insurance and Allied Services (Beveridge) (i) social security (i), (ii) socialism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) socialist commonwealth (i) Socrates (i) Solow, Robert (i) Soros, George (i), (ii), (iii) South Africa, war with Britain (i) South Korea, and the big push (i) Soviet Union and America (i) and communism (i), (ii) speculation (i) speculative lending (i) Spence, Michael (i) spending government (fiscal policy) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) and recessions (i), (ii) and Say’s Law (i) see also investment stagflation (i), (ii) Stalin, Joseph (i) standard economics (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Standard Oil (i) Stiglitz, Joseph (i) stock (i) stock market (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) stockbrokers (i) Strassmann, Diana (i), (ii) strategic interaction (i), (ii) strikes (i) subprime loans (i) subsidies (i), (ii) subsistence (i) sumptuary laws (i) supply curve (i) supply and demand (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and currencies (i) and equilibrium (i), (ii) in recession (i), (ii), (iii) supply-side economics (i) surplus value (i), (ii) Swan, Trevor (i) tariff (i) taxes/taxation (i) and budget deficit (i) carbon (i) and carbon emissions (i) and France (i) and public goods (i) redistribution of wealth (i) and rent-seeking (i) technology as endogenous/exogenous (i) and growth (i) and living standards (i) terms of trade (i) Thailand (i) Thaler, Richard (i) theory (i) Theory of the Leisure Class, The (Veblen) (i) Theory of Monopolistic Competition (Chamberlain) (i) Thompson, William Hale ‘Big Bill’ (i) threat (i) time inconsistency (i), (ii) time intensity (i) Tocqueville, Alexis de (i) totalitarianism (i) trade (i), (ii), (iii) and dependency theory (i) free (i), (ii), (iii) trading permit, carbon (i) traditional and modern economies (i), (ii) transplant, organ (i) Treatise of the Canker of England’s Common Wealth, A (Malynes) (i) Tversky, Amos (i), (ii) underdeveloped countries (i) unemployment in Britain (i) and the government (i) and the Great Depression (i) and information economics (i) and Keynes (i) and market clearing (i) and recession (i) unions (i), (ii) United States of America and free trade (i) and growth of government (i) industrialisation (i) and Latin America (i) Microsoft (i) recession (i), (ii) and the Soviet Union (i) and Standard Oil (i) stock market (i) wealth in (i) women in the labour force (i) unpaid labour, and women (i) usury (i), (ii), (iii) utility (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) utopian thinkers (i), (ii) Vanderbilt, Cornelius (i), (ii) Veblen, Thorstein (i), (ii), (iii) velocity of circulation (i), (ii) Vickrey, William (i) wage, minimum (i) Walras, Léon (i) Waring, Marilyn (i) wealth (i) and Aristotle (i), (ii) and Christianity (i) Piketty on (i) and Plato (i) Smith on (i) Wealth of Nations, The (Smith) (i), (ii) welfare benefits (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) welfare economics (i) Who Pays for the Kids?


Mastering Prezi for Business Presentations by Russell Anderson-Williams

business process, call centre, market design, off-the-grid, Skype

These could be your company departments or products. Sales Events My business Marketing Training [ 74 ] Chapter 4 3. Then focus on one sub heading at a time and write any key information you can think of around that. Again link each point back to its heading with arrows or lines. My business Marketing Design Social Media Corporate logo Style Twitter FB LinkedIn 4. Keep repeating these steps until you have either ran out of things to write, or you've found the key points to explain in your Prezi. Try to avoid using ruled paper as it may encourage you to start writing a list instead of a Mind Map. 5.

Once you identify the key points that need to be presented in your Prezi, underline them or highlight them in some way so that they stand out from everything else. 6. For each of the key points, try to think of an image that will help visualize it and do a quick sketch of the image. It doesn't have to be a work of art! My business Marketing Design Social Media LinkedIn [ 75 ] Corporate logo Approaching Your Prezi Design If you aren't familiar with the Mind Mapping technique, then try to go through the preceding steps as many times as you can, and for as many subjects as you can think of. This form of mental exercise will help you think in the right way for Prezi, and will also help your brain make connections between the text and imagery on your map.


pages: 470 words: 107,074

California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric--And What It Means for America's Power Grid by Katherine Blunt

An Inconvenient Truth, benefit corporation, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, call centre, commoditize, confounding variable, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, electricity market, Elon Musk, forensic accounting, Google Earth, high-speed rail, junk bonds, lock screen, market clearing, market design, off-the-grid, price stability, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, vertical integration

Staff of the grid operator, the CPUC, the legislature, and the utilities bickered almost every week about how the market should function. It was supposed to open in January 1998. Come the New Year, it was nowhere near ready. It wasn’t for lack of effort. The Power Exchange had a small but mighty staff that worked long hours to hone the market design. They ran simulations in the spring, only to find the software full of glitches. The system kept crashing. It took weeks to scare out the bugs. The pieces finally fell into place late one Sunday night in March. Sladoje made some calls. It was ready. The Power Exchange began processing trades on the last day of the month.

Most any deal needed the support of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which had assumed oversight of wholesale power markets during deregulation. But FERC was hesitant to take a stand. Momentum toward deregulation had started with the federal government, which had allowed states to test different market designs. Regulators feared that intervening in the California crisis would tar the sanctity of the states’ free-market experiments. And they were caught between two administrations as President Bill Clinton handed the reins to George W. Bush, who, as governor of Texas, had supported a sweeping deregulation effort there.

This time, the CPUC would allow the utilities to lock in prices with long-term electricity contracts. The crisis was a lesson in what not to do in overhauling the provision of a critical service. In moving so quickly to restructure the entire industry, lawmakers and regulators failed to anticipate the sorts of contingencies that could seriously stress their peculiar market design. More than a dozen other states pumped the brakes on their own deregulation efforts, hesitant to unleash the forces of competition after watching them devour California. The result was a patchwork of wholesale markets across the United States, all with different designs and degrees of regulation.


pages: 289 words: 113,211

A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation by Richard Bookstaber

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, butterfly effect, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computer age, computerized trading, disintermediation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global macro, implied volatility, index arbitrage, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market design, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, UUNET, William Langewiesche, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

From the structural design of buildings and bridges, to the operation of oil refineries or power plants, to the safety of automobiles and airplanes, we learned our lessons. In contrast, financial markets have seen a tremendous amount of engineering in the past 30 years but the result has been more frequent and severe breakdowns. These breakdowns come about not in spite of our efforts at improving market design, but because of them. The structural risk in the financial markets is a direct result of our attempts to improve the state of the financial markets; its origins are in what we would generally chalk up as progress. The steps that we have taken to make the markets more attuned to our investment desires—the ability to trade quickly, the integration of the financial markets into a global whole, ubiquitous and timely market information, the array of options and other derivative instruments—have exaggerated the pace of activity and the complexity of financial instruments that makes crises inevitable.

When the market ideals collide with the real world, with individuals who are not in control of full information, with institutions that do not act quickly or necessarily in anyone’s best interest, the result is like taking a race car for a spin off-road. In the face of progress and technological advances that have resulted in stability on many fronts, financial markets, designed to provide a mechanism for managing and addressing economic risk, have developed a structure that has made them inherently more risky. The irony is that this structure has features that at face value are desirable, in some cases approaching the essential elements of the ideal. As with many ideals, its origin is in academia, in this case a theoretical framework that underpins a half-century of work in financial economics called the perfect market paradigm.

The more closely we try to follow the ideal, thereby adding complexity and more tightly coupling the actions of the market, the more frequently crises will occur. Attempts at that point to add safety features, to layer on regulations and safeguards, will only add to the complexity of the system and make the accidents more frequent. And when blowups happen in the future I can guarantee that the focus will be directed improperly: not at the issues of market design but at hedge funds where the events are observed. They will be implicated for the simple reason that they are engulfing more and more of the risk-taking landscape. The perception of hedge funds being what it is, they will take the blame and become subject to increased regulation. But blaming hedge funds is a little bit like The Simpsons episode in which a meteorite hits Springfield and the townspeople gather, shouting, “Let’s burn down the observatory so this never happens again!”


pages: 52 words: 14,333

Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising by Ryan Holiday

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, data science, growth hacking, Hacker News, iterative process, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Marc Andreessen, market design, minimum viable product, Multics, Paul Graham, pets.com, post-work, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Steve Wozniak, Travis Kalanick

That’s what we’re going to study in this book. The Rise of the Growth Hacker Since Hotmail, many others—particularly in the tech space—have begun to push and break through the limits of marketing. With a mind for data and a scrappy disregard for the “rules,” they have pioneered a new model of marketing designed to utilize the many new tools that the Internet has made available: E-mail. Data. Social media. Lean methodology. Almost overnight, this breed has become the new rock stars of the Silicon Valley. You see them on the pages of TechCrunch, Fast Company, Mashable, Entrepreneur, and countless other publications.


Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge by Cass R. Sunstein

affirmative action, Andrei Shleifer, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Build a better mousetrap, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, framing effect, Free Software Foundation, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, market bubble, market design, minimum wage unemployment, prediction markets, profit motive, rent control, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, slashdot, stem cell, systematic bias, Ted Sorensen, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Wisdom of Crowds, winner-take-all economy

Government projections are greatly disputed, and some of them might well be self-serving. Prediction markets might provide more reliable estimates.54 3. Regulators might be concerned about the likely risks of a new disease, or of an old disease that seems to be growing in magnitude. To assess the risks, they might create a prediction market designed to project the 132 / Infotopia 4. 5. 6. 7. number of deaths that will be attributed to, for example, flu or mad cow disease over a specified period. Federal and state agencies monitor a range of institutions to ensure that they are solvent.55 One problem is that such agencies do not know whether insolvencies are likely to be many or few in a particular year; another is that the solvency of particular institutions can be difficult to predict in advance.

A prediction market might be used to make forecasts about the future progress of the disease.57 Such markets might generally be used to make forecasts about the likely effects of development projects, such as those involving vaccinations and mortality reductions.58 The Central Intelligence Agency might want to know about the outcome of elections in Iraq, or the likelihood of a feared event in the Middle East. The CIA might create an internal prediction market, designed to aggregate the information held by its own employees. The White House might seek to predict the likelihood and magnitude of damage from natural disasters, including tornadoes and earthquakes. Accurate information could greatly assist in advance planning. Prediction markets could easily be created to help in that task.


pages: 209 words: 13,138

Empirical Market Microstructure: The Institutions, Economics and Econometrics of Securities Trading by Joel Hasbrouck

Alvin Roth, barriers to entry, business cycle, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, discrete time, disintermediation, distributed generation, experimental economics, financial intermediation, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, payment for order flow, power law, price discovery process, price discrimination, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, second-price auction, selection bias, short selling, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, transaction costs, two-sided market, ultimatum game, zero-sum game

The attributes of liquidity just discussed are generally enhanced, and individual agents can trade at lower cost, when the number of participants increases. This force favors market consolidation, the concentration of trading activity in a single mechanism or venue. Differences in market participants (e.g., retail versus institutional investors), however, and innovations by market designers militate in favor of market segmentation (in this context, usually called fragmentation). The number of participants in a security market obviously depends on features of the security, in addition to the trading mechanism. If the aggregate value of the underlying assets is high; if value-relevant information is comprehensive, uniform, and credible; or if the security is a component of an important index, there will be high interest in trading the security.

Solve for the model parameters (α, β, µ, λ) in terms of the inputs, σu2 , 0 , and γ. It turned out that the Bank Leu orders originated from a New York investment banker, Dennis Levine, who subsequently pleaded guilty to insider trading (see Stewart (1992)). 7.2 Multiple Rounds of Trading A practical issue in market design is the determination of when trading should occur. Some firms on the Paris Bourse, for example, trade in twice-per-day call auctions, others continuously within a trading session. What happens in the Kyle model as we increase the number of auctions, ultimately converging to continuous trading?


pages: 130 words: 32,279

Beyond the 4% Rule: The Science of Retirement Portfolios That Last a Lifetime by Abraham Okusanya

asset allocation, diversification, diversified portfolio, high net worth, longitudinal study, low interest rates, market design, mental accounting, Paul Samuelson, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, seminal paper, tail risk, The 4% rule, transaction costs, William Bengen

Drawdown, managed using safe withdrawal rate strategies, sits at the other end in the probability-based camp. There’s a range of products and strategies sitting in between – some with features of both schools. A small number of hybrid or blended retirement income products are available in the market, designed to give clients the best of both worlds. This is achieved by combining two or more products, (eg annuities) to provide essential income and drawdown for discretionary income. Decisions, Decisions Now you understand the two main retirement income philosophies, which one chimes with you the most?


pages: 117 words: 30,538

It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

8-hour work day, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Community Supported Agriculture, content marketing, David Heinemeier Hansson, Jeff Bezos, market design, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Ruby on Rails, Silicon Valley, solopreneur, Stephen Hawking, web application

Customers remained thrilled with our fast service—which was a bit slower than before but still way ahead of the industry—and our team chilled out and did better work. Win-win. Not only was it enough, it was plenty. Worst Practices Every mature industry is drowning in best practices. There are best practices about how to price a product, conduct employee reviews, do content marketing, design a website, or make an app scalable to millions of users. There’s no end to advice claiming to be the best. Yet so much of it is not merely bullshit but quite possibly the worst thing you could do. What counts as the best practice for a company of 10,000 is very rarely so for a company of 10.


pages: 523 words: 111,615

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters by Diane Coyle

accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, bank run, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bonus culture, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, different worldview, disintermediation, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Financial Instability Hypothesis, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, light touch regulation, low skilled workers, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, megacity, Network effects, new economy, night-watchman state, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paradox of Choice, Pareto efficiency, principal–agent problem, profit motive, purchasing power parity, railway mania, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, social contagion, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transfer pricing, tulip mania, ultimatum game, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, web application, web of trust, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

The experimental research has also shed much light on the way the rules of engagement in markets affect the prices and quantities. This literature has led to the creation of a discipline of market design. Governments have been able to sell assets for which it would once have been hard to conceive of a market—radio spectrum, for example, or permission to emit pollutants like sulphur dioxide or carbon. Market design can also improve the way government licenses are issued and sold, the way regulations are imposed, or even the way trading can occur on financial markets. In short, it acknowledges that markets are designed, and this can either be accidental or more deliberate.


pages: 421 words: 110,406

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

At the time of the sale, 70 percent of all eBay auctions accepted PayPal, and roughly 25 percent of closed auction purchases were transacted using the payment service. Today, PayPal produces a major portion of eBay’s revenues and profits while enabling hundreds of thousands of small merchants to conduct business online more easily, efficiently, and profitably than ever before. THE HEART OF PLATFORM MARKETING: DESIGNING FOR VIRAL GROWTH As the PayPal story suggests, building a platform business differs from traditional product or pipeline marketing in a number of ways. For starters, in the world of platform marketing, pull strategies rather than push strategies are most effective and important. The industrial world of pipelines relies heavily on push.

These are endemic in network markets, since, as we’ve seen when examining network effects, the spillover benefits users generate are a source of platform value. Understanding this forces a shift in corporate governance from a narrow focus on shareholder value to a broader view of stakeholder value. Market designer and Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin Roth described a model of governance that uses four broad levers to address market failures.19 According to Roth, a well-designed market increases the safety of the market via transparency, quality, or insurance, thereby enabling good interactions to occur.


pages: 451 words: 115,720

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex by Rupert Darwall

1960s counterculture, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bakken shale, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, gigafactory, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, market design, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, pre–internet, recommendation engine, renewable energy transition, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Solyndra, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, tech baron, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, women in the workforce, young professional

Gulf Coast Conventional Gasoline spot price was during the post-Lehman financial crisis, when investors sought refuge in real assets, and the price doubled in 14 days.9 Even this panic-induced volatility is slight compared to what is experienced in the wholesale electricity market as a matter of course, where there can be a difference of up to four orders of magnitude (1 to 10,000) between the high and low hourly prices in a typical year.10 Wholesale prices drive both short-term scheduling decisions on which generators should supply electricity in response to changes in demand (the merit order curve) and long-term investment decisions. “Heterogeneity of electricity has not only shaped market design but also technology development,” Hirth observes. For homogenous goods, one single production technology is typically efficient. In electricity generation, there is a set of generation technologies that are efficient. “Base load” plants have high investment, but low variable costs; this is reversed for “peak load” plants.

At 30 percent penetration, the curse of intermittency means the value of electricity from wind farms is worth only half that if wind were stable and nonintermittent, and the wholesale price of electricity—one received by coal and gas-fired power stations—falls to zero for 1,000 hours a year, representing 28 percent of the electricity produced by wind farms.23 Solar’s value decline is even steeper because it is more peaky. Compared to a steady source, solar PV’s value is halved before it achieves a 15 percent market share.24 These results are not a function of market design, which could be rectified by a few tweaks here and there, Hirth notes. Rather they are a direct consequence of the inescapable characteristics of wind and solar generation.25 In the real world, Hirth finds that wind and solar generators produce disproportionately more power in regions of low electricity prices and produce disproportionately more power at times of low electricity prices.26 At the then-prevailing €68 ($76) per MWh cost of windpower, Hirth estimates wind’s optimal share of the Northwest European market to be around 2 percent.27 Solar is a lot worse.


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Companies exposed to competition are always vulnerable to change, and when they become focused on finance rather than market contestability, they need to find other ways of protecting the boundaries of the firm and their market positions. That protection is increasingly about playing zone or company-to-company defense of markets. Those that have been around in corporate life know that, aside from specialization, there are several ways to do that. They include lobbying, branding, marketing, design, and incremental changes in products that give the pretense of development. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) and general public relations campaigns emerged later but are today part of the same toolbox. Together they all help to create customer loyalty and political protection. What used to be the icing on the cake – activities to support innovations and real business competition – have become more important than innovation itself to combat competitors.

In the production of a typical German car, for example, foreign value added increased from 21 percent in 1995 to 34 percent in 2008.44 A more famous example, from the really fragmented electronics sector, is Apple’s music player, the iPod.45 While an iPod – just like an iPhone – is “made in China,” only about 2 percent of the value added of an iPod is captured by China. In other words, 98 percent of the value of this particular export is generated abroad. The United States – where Apple has its headquarters and invests in marketing, design, R&D, and more – takes between one-third and one-half of the iPod value added. This is a familiar situation for many countries. East Asia’s magnificent rise in trade, for example, is closely tied to trade in global production networks, but the richer they have grown, the more important it has become to capture a larger part of the value-added content of traded goods.46 In Europe, too, the rise of cross-border production networks has transformed production and trade.


pages: 469 words: 132,438

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons

The other market would be for variable power from unpredictable generators, such as solar and wind, which cannot guarantee their output.50 Prominent energy analyst Michael Liebreich argues that the difference in prices between the two markets, which he dubs the “Firm Spread,” will rise as value deflation accompanies the rise of variable solar and wind power. And that spread will attract reliable sources of firm generation capacity, as well as innovation to develop such new, flexible resources as virtual power plants or storage technologies.51 Ideas like that one are still very much on the drawing board. But that is the sort of innovative market design that might be required to ensure that a diverse mix of zero-carbon power resources coexists. Indeed, the power sector is supposed to be the easy one to decarbonize. The rest of the economy, starting with transportation, presents even thornier challenges. Batteries on the Go The most obvious way to extend decarbonization from the power sector to the transportation sector is through vehicle electrification.

., “Merit-Order Effects of Renewable Energy and Price Divergence in California’s Day-Ahead and Real-Time Electricity Markets,” Energy Policy 92 (2016): 299–312, doi:10.1016/j.enpol.2016.02.023. 43.  Andre Gensler et al., “Deep Learning for Solar Power Forecasting—An Approach Using AutoEncoder and LSTM Neural Networks,” IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 2016, http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7844673/. 44.  E. Ela et al., “Wholesale Electricity Market Design with Increasing Levels of Renewable Generation: Incentivizing Flexibility in System Operations,” The Electricity Journal 29, no. 4 (2016): 51–60, doi:10.1016/j.tej.2016.05.001. 45.  Jenny Riesz and Michael Milligan, “Designing Electricity Markets for a High Penetration of Variable Renewables,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Energy and Environment 4, no. 3 (2014): 279–289, doi:10.1002/wene.137. 46.  


pages: 461 words: 128,421

The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Wald, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, card file, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, democratizing finance, Dennis Tito, discovery of the americas, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Glaeser, Edward Thorp, endowment effect, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, fixed income, floating exchange rates, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, impulse control, index arbitrage, index card, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, Nikolai Kondratiev, Paul Lévy, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, power law, prediction markets, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, pushing on a string, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stocks for the long run, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, volatility smile, Yogi Berra

The study of finance was replete with experimental possibilities. When one designs a market experiment, it’s possible to know with certainty the intrinsic, fundamental value of the securities being traded. More often than not, in the markets designed by Smith, Plott, and others, prices converged toward that value—but not always. Bubbles developed; markets failed. Much depended on the rules that governed the market, and the greatest impact of experimental economics has been on market design. Plott had even grander ambitions. During an academic year spent at the University of Chicago in the late 1970s, he asked Eugene Fama for advice on testing his efficient market hypothesis in an experimental setting.


pages: 208 words: 51,277

Chicken: The Dangerous Transformation of America's Favorite Food by Steve Striffler

clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, longitudinal study, market design, place-making, Ronald Reagan, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

The early rise of chicken was driven by a combination of, on the one hand, consumer demand for a cheap, healthy source of animal protein and, on the other, an agroscientific revolution carried out by farmers, workers, scientists, and others that delivered large quantities of affordable chicken to consumers by the end of the s. By contrast, the more recent rise of processed chicken has been only partially about consumer demand for “convenience foods.” Engineering and Marketing Chicken Processed chicken is a product of food engineering and clever marketing, designed to combat a problem that has plagued the industry from its inception: Chicken in its most basic form is simply not that profitable. Historically, profit margins within the meat industry have been not only slim, but also unstable A New Bird 20 [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]


pages: 169 words: 52,744

Big Capital: Who Is London For? by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land bank, land value tax, market design, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-truth, quantitative easing, rent control, rent gap, Right to Buy, Russell Brand, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban renewal, working poor

The rate of return on London property, even in a market slowed by economic uncertainty, far exceeds growth, let alone wages, which are among the lowest in Europe. It is these rates of return on property that are driving the reconfiguration of London, boosted by policy decisions carried out by local authorities, which are in tune with deliberate changes in housing policy and the property market, designed to take maximum advantage of the attraction of London real estate to global investors. This has little to do with the process that Glass or even Lees describe, which saw capital invested in gentrifying parts of the city at a much slower rate, over generations rather than a few years: as such, it is crucial that the impact of global capital and foreign investment is scrutinized for its local effects.


pages: 589 words: 147,053

The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson

8-hour work day, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, brain emulation, business cycle, business process, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, deep learning, demographic transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fault tolerance, financial intermediation, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, information asymmetry, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, lone genius, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, market design, megaproject, meta-analysis, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pneumatic tube, power law, prediction markets, quantum cryptography, rent control, rent-seeking, reversible computing, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Vernor Vinge, William MacAskill

A return to mass production should result in more long-term growth, simpler and more standardized products, larger factories that achieve more economies of scale and scope, and better but more expensive tools. A return to mass production should also encourage organizational divisions centered less on types of customers and products and more on functions such as sales, marketing, design, production, and shipping (Salvador et al. 2009; Piller 2008). All these changes might be reduced, however, if parasites such as computer viruses can exploit mass-produced products, and so discourage them relative to other products. A shift toward mass production should modestly increase the value of automation and software tools, as for mass products the fixed cost of developing such tools is spread out over a larger scope of use of such tools.

October. http://hanson.gmu.edu/aigrow.pdf. Hanson, Robin. 2000. “Long-Term Growth as a Sequence of Exponential Modes.” October. http://hanson.gmu.edu/longgrow.pdf. Hanson, Robin. 2001. “How to Live in a Simulation.” Journal of Evolution and Technology 7(September). Hanson, Robin. 2003. “Combinatorial Information Market Design.” Information Systems Frontiers 5(1): 105–119. Hanson, Robin. 2005. “He Who Pays The Piper Must Know The Tune.” April. http://hanson.gmu.edu/expert.pdf. Hanson, Robin. 2006a. “Decision Markets for Policy Advice.” In Promoting the General Welfare: American Democracy and the Political Economy of Government Performance, edited by Eric Patashnik and Alan Gerber, 151–173.


pages: 565 words: 151,129

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Josiah Neeley, “Texas Windpower: Will Negative Pricing Blow Out the Lights? (PTC vs. Reliable New Capacity),” MasterResource, November 27, 2012, http://www.masterresource .org/2012/11/texas-negative-pricing-ptc/ (accessed August 2, 2013). 42. Rachel Morison, “Renewables Make German Power Market Design Defunct, Utility Says,” Bloomberg, June 26, 2012, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-26/renewables-make -german-power-market-design-defunct-utility-says.html (accessed April 29, 2013). 43. Nic Brisbourne, “Solar Power—A Case Study in Exponential Growth,” The Equity Kicker, September 25, 2012, http://www.theequitykicker.com/2012/09/25/solar-powera-case-study-in -exponential-growth/ (accessed May 27, 2013). 44.


pages: 210 words: 62,278

No One Succeeds Alone by Robert Reffkin

Albert Einstein, coronavirus, COVID-19, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, market design, pattern recognition, Salesforce, Steve Jobs, young professional

I focused my energy on learning to adapt and adjust to more and more situations. Being extremely adaptable is a hugely valuable skill. It transforms every interaction into an opportunity. These days, I might talk to an investor in Asia, a software engineer in Seattle, a newly hired real estate agent in Miami, my eldest daughter Raia on FaceTime, a junior marketing designer in New York, and a reporter from the Wall Street Journal—all in a single hour. And for each conversation, I adapt. People throughout my life have made me feel like I don’t belong. But I haven’t listened. Being able to adapt to anything made me feel that I was never out of place and that no one could ever “put me in my place.”


pages: 247 words: 60,543

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony by David G. W. Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bank run, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, COVID-19, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, Diane Coyle, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global village, Hyman Minsky, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market design, Marshall McLuhan, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, one-China policy, Overton Window, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pingit, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, railway mania, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subscription business, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, Washington Consensus

— James Rickards, Currency Wars (2012) It seems to me, and to many other observers, that the key to taking the title of Prime currency away from the US dollar lies in designing and building a market based on a digital sovereign alternative: in essence, turning sovereign debt (bonds) into money that can be passed from person to person. This would be a market designed from the ground up for the express purpose of exceeding the depth and liquidity characteristics of the US Treasury market (Townsend 2018b). It would extend the safety and security of desirable sovereign debt to global citizens. At least one nation state is already thinking along these lines.


Smart Grid Standards by Takuro Sato

business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, data acquisition, decarbonisation, demand response, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, exponential backoff, factory automation, Ford Model T, green new deal, green transition, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Iridium satellite, iterative process, knowledge economy, life extension, linear programming, low earth orbit, machine readable, market design, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, OSI model, packet switching, performance metric, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, smart transportation, Thomas Davenport

In addition, it requires concurrent efforts to develop and implement improved wind plant-modeling and forecasting capabilities (continued overleaf) Smart Grid Standards 58 Table 2.8 (continued) Research and development area Barrier Responses Market and regulatory Barrier Responses Market design and structure The small operations areas are the barrier, which increase the cost of integrating wind energy into the grid To rectify this issue, it requires a policy and market design that allow smaller operating areas to function in a consolidated manner To resolve the limit on long-distance power transfer, including cost allocation for new transmission projects To ensure grid market access to plants with operational characteristics of renewable energy To develop techniques and methods for accurately valuing the additional costs as well as the value of grid services, which can determine issues of wind energy evaluation To facilitate worker training and encourage committed interest in the industry, including the establishment of a strong university/industry linkage Operational value Transmitting wind energy to population centers requires simple transfer of power over long distances Restriction with low marginal costs might become an issue with high renewable electricity penetration Instead of being recognized for grid service capabilities of wind energy, it is criticized for its variable output due to the nature of the wind Workforce development Skilled manpower is required to support a rapid expansion of the wind industry Environmental and siting Barrier Responses Wildlife impacts Rare birds can restrain the deployment of wind energy It needs regular monitoring of wildlife impacts, development of impact mitigation strategies, and standardization Intensive study is required to identify the impacts to habitat and resulting wildlife displacement, which can result in policy solutions to constant industry challenges In both cases a proper awareness program about wind energy is required, which can help policymakers in weighing the trade-offs of wind energy.


Fodor's Barcelona by Fodor's

Albert Einstein, call centre, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, low cost airline, market design, Suez canal 1869, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

After their victory, the Bourbon forces obliged residents of the Barri de la Ribera (Waterfront District) to tear down nearly a thousand of their own houses, some 20% of Barcelona at that time, to create fields of fire so that the occupying army of Felipe V could better train its batteries of cannon on the conquered populace in order to repress nationalist uprisings. Walk down to the Born itself—a great iron hangar, once a produce market designed by Josep Fontseré. The initial stages of the construction of a public library in the Born uncovered the perfectly preserved lost city of 1714, complete with blackened fireplaces, taverns, wells, and the canal that brought water into the city. The Museu d’Història de la Ciutat offers free visits overlooking the ruins of the 14th- to 18th-century Barri de la Ribera on weekends 10–3. | Born-Ribera | Station: Jaume I.

Although the 30-foot floor-to-ceiling wooden shutters are already a visual feast, the carefully prepared interpretations of old standards such as the carpaccio de toro de lidia (carpaccio of fighting bull) with basil sauce and pine nuts, awaken the palate brilliantly. The separate dining room, for anywhere from a dozen to two dozen diners, is a perfect place for a private party. | Carrer Cometa 5, Barri Gòtic | 08002 | 93/310–1558 | AE, DC, MC, V | Closed Tues. | Station: Jaume I Cuines Santa Caterina. $$–$$$ | ECLECTIC | A lovingly restored market designed by the late Enric Miralles and completed by his widow Benedetta Tagliabue provides a spectacular setting for one of the city’s most original dining operations. Under the undulating wooden superstructure of the market, the breakfast and tapas bar, open from dawn to midnight, offers a variety of culinary specialties cross-referenced by cultures (Mediterranean, Asian) and products (pasta, rice, fish, meat), all served on sleek counters and long wooden tables. | Av.


pages: 769 words: 169,096

Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities by Alain Bertaud

autonomous vehicles, call centre, colonial rule, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, garden city movement, gentrification, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land tenure, manufacturing employment, market design, market fragmentation, megacity, microapartment, new economy, New Urbanism, openstreetmap, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, rent control, Right to Buy, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, the built environment, trade route, transaction costs, transit-oriented development, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

In addition, Jonathan played a particularly important role in reviewing the early chapters of the book and providing his insights as an economist. Eventually, when the writing of this book was sufficiently advanced, I was asked to teach a course to New York University students. The course, called “Markets, Design, and the City,” followed the sequence of the book’s chapters. It was a good way to test its content on the critical minds of NYU graduate students. It became an occasion for further exchanges of ideas and perspectives, as the students came from many different countries. We still meet regularly with some of them, who by now are pursuing careers in urban planning: Eduard Cabré-Romans, Javier Garciadiego Ruiz, Hannah Kates, Simon Lim, Jwanah Qudsi, and Amalia Toro Restrepo.

By contrast, a design solution to increase the average consumption of floor space might establish a minimum regulatory house size to prevent developers from building small houses, or it would require the government to subsidize and build a sufficient number of large apartments for low-income households every year. As the consumption of floor space is a market outcome, design solutions, which aim to increase consumption, never work in the long run. I will discuss this design failure in detail in chapter 7. Links between Markets, Design, and Urban Indicators A simple schematic flowchart (figure 3.11), whose inputs and outputs can be calculated in a simple spreadsheet, could help differentiate the role of markets and design in the development of cities. The flowchart should be helpful for understanding the mathematical relationships among people, jobs, floor space, land, and road infrastructure in the framework that I have been using: differentiating between markets and design.


pages: 247 words: 63,208

The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and Performance by Jim Whitehurst

Airbnb, behavioural economics, cloud computing, content marketing, crowdsourcing, digital capitalism, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, Google Hangouts, Infrastructure as a Service, job satisfaction, Kaizen: continuous improvement, market design, meritocracy, Network effects, new economy, place-making, platform as a service, post-materialism, profit motive, risk tolerance, Salesforce, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tony Hsieh

People invest their time in making Linux a better operating system because, by virtue of making computing safer, faster, and more open, they feel as if they make the world a better place. It’s that compelling purpose that brings so many people together to work on Linux and other open source projects. Not just programmers, but also writers, testers, marketers, designers, and administrators contribute their combined efforts to create something no one traditional organization could do on its own. One study estimated, for instance, that if you started from scratch, it would take about eight thousand years of development time to recreate Linux, at a reported cost of more than $10 billion.1 That’s powerful stuff.


pages: 202 words: 64,725

Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life by Bill Burnett, Dave Evans

David Brooks, fail fast, fear of failure, financial independence, game design, Haight Ashbury, impact investing, invention of the printing press, iterative process, knowledge worker, market design, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, TED Talk

Thank you, thank you, Vicky. Notes Introduction: Life by Design 1. Jon Krakower, inventor of the Apple notebook configuration, see European Patent EP 0515664 B1, Laptop Computer Having Integrated Keyboard, Cursor Control Device and Palm Rest, and Artemis March, Apple PowerBook (A): Design Quality and Time to Market, Design Management Institute Case Study 9-994-023 (Boston: Design Management Institute Press, 1994). 2. Lindsay Oishi, “Enhancing Career Development Agency in Emerging Adulthood: An Intervention Using Design Thinking,” doctoral dissertation, Graduate School of Education, Stanford University, 2012. T.


pages: 252 words: 70,424

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value by John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen

Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Colonization of Mars, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, driverless car, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, global supply chain, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Jony Ive, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megaproject, old-boy network, paper trading, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Virgin Galactic, young professional

Producers can think small—in Jaharis’s case by concentrating on how a medication is delivered—in order to capture something large—demand for a continuous-release nitroglycerin. We use the verb “design” in this context to describe the solutions to the problem of producing a new offering, and making the necessary deals to bring it to the market. Design takes into account multiple factors: the strategy and tactics, the terms of the sale and the deal, the ownership and distribution, the customer experience, and so forth. Producers alter or redesign any and every aspect of bringing a product to market. They will tackle physical product design, product delivery, pricing, the business model, and the sales pitch.


pages: 215 words: 71,155

Celebrating the Third Place: Inspiring Stories About the Great Good Places at the Heart of Our Communities by Ray Oldenburg

Celebration, Florida, gentrification, Jane Jacobs, land bank, market design, New Urbanism, place-making, Ray Oldenburg, Seaside, Florida, the built environment, The Great Good Place, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, walkable city

Work hard, play hard. . . .” Owning a third place evidently runs in my blood—my father, grandparents, and great-grandparents all owned neighborhood corner-grocery-store hangouts. Tunnicliff’s is located opposite historic Eastern Market, which is truly the heart of Capitol Hill. It is a year-round old-fashioned food market, designed in 1873 by the Smithsonian’s Renwick Castle’s architect, Adolph Cluss, with a weekend Parisian-style craft and flea market. It is very much like the New Orleans French Market. Weekends are especially exciting with bargains galore, delicious foods, and friends greeting friends. Our Eastern Market neighborhood is truly a thriving interstitial community Tunnicliff’s Tavern originally opened as the Eastern Branch Hotel in 1793, “stabling horses, lodging gentlemen or ladies.”


pages: 1,164 words: 309,327

Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners by Larry Harris

active measures, Andrei Shleifer, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, automated trading system, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bob Litterman, book value, business cycle, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, compound rate of return, computerized trading, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, data acquisition, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, fault tolerance, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, High speed trading, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, invention of the telegraph, job automation, junk bonds, law of one price, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, market fragmentation, market friction, market microstructure, money market fund, Myron Scholes, National best bid and offer, Nick Leeson, open economy, passive investing, pattern recognition, payment for order flow, Ponzi scheme, post-materialism, price discovery process, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit motive, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent-seeking, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, search costs, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Small Order Execution System, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, the market place, transaction costs, two-sided market, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Good audit trails include detailed information about everything that happens to each order. Regulators use audit trails to determine whether traders have violated trading rules. An accurate audit trail helps keep brokers honest. Floor-based markets have extensive rules that govern how traders process orders and record trades. Markets design these rules to make the audit trail complete, reliable, and accurate. These rules require traders to time-stamp their orders when they receive them and when they fill them, to record trades sequentially, and to report trades immediately. * * * ▶ What Would You Think? Eli needed to roll a 10-contract short futures position in the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index futures from June to September contracts.

When too many traders try to participate in the same oral auction, they exceed its capacity to process information in an orderly fashion. When the number of traders bidding and offering is large, traders in an oral auction cannot easily keep track of who is quoting the best prices. They then may arrange trades that violate time precedence or even price priority. Futures and options markets designate such disorderly markets as fast trading markets. The designation tells brokerage customers that they cannot expect their brokers to fill their orders at the best available prices when the market is trading fast. In the confusion of a fast market, the brokers may be unaware of the best trading opportunities.

• In the United States, the margins required to obtain equivalent-sized risk exposure in equities, equity options, and equity futures are quite unequal. Should margin rates be standardized across similar instruments? What accounts for the differences in margin rates in these markets? • During crashes, volume often rises to very extremely high levels. How much excess capacity should markets design into their systems to ensure that they are not overwhelmed in a crash? How would you balance the very high costs of building system capacity with the very high costs of failing to meet demands for that capacity which may never occur? • Can circuit breakers lower the optimal design capacity of a trading system?


pages: 273 words: 21,102

Branding Your Business: Promoting Your Business, Attracting Customers and Standing Out in the Market Place by James Hammond

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, call centre, Donald Trump, intangible asset, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, market design, Nelson Mandela, Pepsi Challenge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steve Jobs, the market place

Last, but by no means least, a very special thank you must go to my wife, Mary, herself a successful marketing and public relations consultant, for putting up with a grumpy old man for months on end as he struggled to complete the manuscript within the deadline. (I would have mentioned my cats, Mr George and Tibbles, but they’re too busy eating or sleeping to care either way.) THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK x About the author James Hammond has spent almost 30 years in advertising, marketing, design and branding. From his initial time as a graphic designer and copywriter, he progressed to heading up brand consultancies responsible for the brand management, sales and marketing, corporate identity and advertising for Top 100 companies including Yellow Pages, Virgin, Norwich Union, EMI and British Telecom.


pages: 209 words: 80,086

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, David Ashton

active measures, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dutch auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market design, meritocracy, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, post-industrial society, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, working poor, zero-sum game

Except it needed a greater degree of oversight and more in-house resources.”4 It is for these reasons that some companies, especially those based in South Korea and Japan, continue to keep a broad range of activities in house, although they were not immune from the consequences of global recession. Today, a key issue for all companies is how to connect profit centers, business units, product markets, design teams, suppliers, Managing in the Global Auction 103 franchisees, research centers, universities, licensees, business start-ups, and strategic alliances with competitor companies wanting to share the costs of research or business processes. The calculation of the costs and benefits associated with building these linkages, whether within the core business, through alliances, or through outsourcing or offshoring, is now an integral part of the corporate drive to competitive advantage.


The Jobs to Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs by Jim Kalbach

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Build a better mousetrap, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, data science, Dean Kamen, fail fast, Google Glasses, job automation, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, market design, minimum viable product, prediction markets, Quicken Loans, Salesforce, shareholder value, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Zipcar

They write:8 You can begin to look systematically for opportunities to create value... A great way to begin is to consider the biggest drawbacks of current solutions at each step in the map—in particular, drawbacks related to speed of execution, variability, and the quality of output. To increase the effectiveness of this approach, invite a diverse team of experts—marketing, design, engineering, and even some lead customers—to participate in this discussion. FIGURE 3.7 Determine the stages of the main job by clustering micro-jobs found during research. Innovation opportunities can come at any stage in the job map. Consider these examples: • Weight Watchers streamlines the “Define” stage with a system that does not require calorie counting


pages: 240 words: 78,436

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier, Benoit Reillier

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, blockchain, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Diane Coyle, Didi Chuxing, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, multi-sided market, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, search costs, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, Y Combinator

Markides, Fast Second: How Smart Companies Bypass Radical Innovation to Enter and Dominate New Markets, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2005. 11 David Teece, ‘The Foundations of Enterprise Performance: Dynamic and Ordinary Capabilities in an (Economic) Theory of Firms’, Academy of Management Perspectives, 8(4), 2014, 328–52. 204 Competing against platforms 12 Zalando generated €3.6 billion in 2016, with a growth rate of 23%, 17 January 2017, Zalando’s corporate website. 13 ‘How Zalando Is Becoming the Online Fashion Platform for Europe’, 1 June 2016, https://blog.zalando.com/en/blog/how-zalando-becoming-online-fashion-platformeurope. 14 Murad Ahmed and Adam Thomson, ‘Accor to Acquire Online Home Rental Site Onefinestay’, Financial Times, 5 April 2016. Chapter 15 The future of platforms As we have seen, platform-based business models are having a profound impact on the business world. In the words of Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan, in their insightful book The Inner Lives of Markets: Not even the market designers themselves have all the answers: economics is an inexact science, and every time we participate in a market innovation – each time we hail a ride via a smartphone or download a song via iTunes – we’re part of a massive social experiment whose ultimate consequences are unknown. While, like them, we remain optimistic and see the potential for good, we are acutely aware that the long-term consequences of the current platform revolution are unclear.


Where Does Money Come From?: A Guide to the UK Monetary & Banking System by Josh Ryan-Collins, Tony Greenham, Richard Werner, Andrew Jackson

bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, credit crunch, currency risk, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial innovation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global reserve currency, Goodhart's law, Hyman Minsky, inflation targeting, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Joseph Schumpeter, low skilled workers, market clearing, market design, market friction, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, Post-Keynesian economics, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, special drawing rights, the payments system, trade route, transaction costs

We also examine the concepts of bank ‘solvency’ and ‘capital’ and examine how a commercial bank’s balance sheet is structured. Chapter 5 examines the extent to which commercial bank money is effectively regulated. We analyse how the Bank of England attempts to conduct monetary policy through interventions in the money markets designed to move the price of money (the interest rate) and through its direct dealings with banks. This section also includes a review of the financial crisis and how neither liquidity nor capital adequacy regulatory frameworks were effective in preventing asset bubbles and ultimately the crisis itself.


pages: 302 words: 83,116

SuperFreakonomics by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

agricultural Revolution, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Boris Johnson, call centre, clean water, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, Did the Death of Australian Inheritance Taxes Affect Deaths, disintermediation, endowment effect, experimental economics, food miles, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), John Nash: game theory, Joseph Schumpeter, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, market design, microcredit, Milgram experiment, Neal Stephenson, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, patent troll, power law, presumed consent, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, selection bias, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, urban planning, William Langewiesche, women in the workforce, young professional

. / 198 There is no regulatory framework: for further reading, see “The Sun Blotted Out from the Sky,” Elizabeth Svoboda, Salon.com, April 2, 2008. / 199 Certain new ideas…are invariably seen as repugnant: the dean of repugnance studies is the Harvard economist Alvin E. Roth, whose work can be see at the Market Design blog. See also: Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, “Flesh Trade,” The New York Times Magazine, July 9, 2006; and Viviana A. Zelizer, “Human Values and the Market: The Case of Life Insurance and Death in 19th Century America,” American Journal of Sociology 84, no. 3 (November 1978). / 200 Al Gore is quoted here and elsewhere in Leonard David, “Al Gore: Earth Is in ‘Full-Scale Planetary Emergency,’” Space.com, October 26, 2006. / 201–202 The “soggy mirrors” plan: see John Latham, “Amelioration of Global Warming by Controlled Enhancement of the Albedo and Longevity of Low-Level Maritime Clouds,” Atmospheric Science Letters 3, no. 2 (2002). / 201 Contrail clouds: see David J.


pages: 300 words: 85,043

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win by Jocko Willink, Leif Babin

friendly fire, market design, urban sprawl

“I’ll give it a try.” He was eager to turn the company’s performance around. For the next several months the CEO focused the efforts of the entire company on supporting the frontline sales force, making it clear that this was the company’s highest priority. The labs set up tours for customers. The marketing designers helped create new, informative pamphlets for products. Sales managers set minimum marks for the number of introductory meetings with doctors and medical administrators that the sales force had to achieve each week. The company’s marketing team created online videos interviewing their top salespeople on the most successful techniques so that others could watch and learn.


pages: 411 words: 80,925

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, Community Supported Agriculture, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global village, hedonic treadmill, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, information retrieval, intentional community, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Simon Kuznets, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, South of Market, San Francisco, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, web of trust, women in the workforce, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

It designed its rankings system, then recommendations, and peer-to-peer support, and finally an easy way to download movies straight to the user’s computer. This gradual evolution of experience was managed in a way that didn’t lose or frustrate the user. To work within ever-changing sectors (and every business operates in one), the designer needs a holistic understanding of technology, behavioral science, and marketing. Designers can and must play a critical role in uncovering what people need and want from systems of Collaborative Consumption, ensuring that they gain enough critical mass to continue to improve and scale. Ezio Manzini is a professor of industrial design at Politecnico di Milano and a thought leader on strategic design for sustainability.


pages: 288 words: 81,253

Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Filter Bubble, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, loss aversion, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, p-value, phenotype, prediction markets, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, urban planning, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Schelling (2005, game theory, “for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game theory analysis”); (6) Leonid Hurwicz, (7) Eric S. Maskin, and (8) Roger B. Myerson (2007, microeconomics, “for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory”); (9) Alvin E. Roth and (10) Lloyd S. Shapley (2012, applied game theory, “for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design”); and (11) Jean Tirole (2014, industrial organization, microeconomics, “for his analysis of market power and regulation”). Poker vs. chess: My brother Howard came from a chess background, but the movement of players from chess into poker is relatively rare. In my opinion, the lack of uncertainty in chess compared with the great uncertainty in poker is a barrier to transitioning from one to the other.


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Associates most affected by this person’s work must accept the CLOU before it goes into effect. What is the financial impact? The company has funded virtually all its growth from internal sources, which suggests it is robustly profitable. On the basis of its own benchmarking data, Morning Star believes it is the world’s most efficient tomato processor. FAVI (1960) – 440 employees Market: Designer and manufacturer of copper alloy automotive components How is the company organized? FAVI has no hierarchy or personnel department, and there is no middle management or formal procedures. Teams are organized around customers. Each team is responsible not only for the customer, but for its own human resources, purchasing and product development.


pages: 247 words: 81,135

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small by Steve Sammartino

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, helicopter parent, hype cycle, illegal immigration, index fund, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, lifelogging, market design, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe's law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, Rubik’s Cube, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, The Home Computer Revolution, the long tail, too big to fail, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, web application, zero-sum game

We had to have the latest widget of desire, see the show and participate in the fad. Fads were rad. They formed part of the lore that made our so-called community, a community that was a substitute for natural human inclinations. The selfish era Mass marketing was a selfish modality of marketing designed by and for the owners of capital, and not only financial capital, but mind capital. The average suburban dweller became everyone and no one. We had all loved and believed in average products with the edges rounded off. There are a lot of examples of selfish marketing occurring on a repetitive and formulaic level beyond that of the fads mentioned above.


pages: 268 words: 81,811

Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History by Liam Vaughan

algorithmic trading, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, data science, Donald Trump, Elliott wave, eurozone crisis, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, Great Grain Robbery, high net worth, High speed trading, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, land bank, margin call, market design, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Navinder Sarao, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nelson Elliott, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ronald Reagan, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, Stephen Hawking, the market place, Timothy McVeigh, Tobin tax, tulip mania, yield curve, zero-sum game

“What happens if a major event causes turmoil”: Joe Saluzzi, “HFT Roundtable,” Themis Trading blog, June 17, 2009, https://blog.themistrading.com. “never-ending socially-wasteful arms race for speed”: Eric Budish, Peter Cramton, and John Shim, “The High-Frequency Trading Arms Race: Frequent Batch Auctions as a Market Design Response,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 130 (November 2015). HFT firms largely eradicated losses: Although that didn’t necessarily mean they were profitable, since the cost of technology and data were high and rising. They also helped create a situation: I was unable to source figures for cancelation rates in 2010, but by 2015, as many as 95 percent of orders on the CME were canceled before they were executed, according to University of Southern California professor Larry Harris’s testimony during Nav’s extradition hearing.


pages: 321

Finding Alphas: A Quantitative Approach to Building Trading Strategies by Igor Tulchinsky

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, automated trading system, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, constrained optimization, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, data science, deep learning, discounted cash flows, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, intangible asset, iterative process, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, machine readable, market design, market microstructure, merger arbitrage, natural language processing, passive investing, pattern recognition, performance metric, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, popular capitalism, prediction markets, price discovery process, profit motive, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, selection bias, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, survivorship bias, systematic bias, systematic trading, text mining, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, yield curve

Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 4 Finding Alphas be executed in the financial securities markets. We develop, test, and trade alphas in large numbers because even if markets are operating efficiently, something has to drive prices toward equilibrium, and that means opportunity should always exist. To use a common metaphor, an alpha is an attempt to capture a signal in an always noisy market. DESIGNING ALPHAS BASED ON DATA We design alphas based on data, which we are constantly seeking to augment and diversify. Securities prices generally change in response to some event; that event should be reflected in the data. If the data never changes, then there is no alpha. Changes in the data convey information.


pages: 338 words: 85,566

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy by Jonathan Haskel, Stian Westlake

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Andrei Shleifer, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book value, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Charles Lindbergh, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, congestion charging, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, Diane Coyle, Dominic Cummings, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, equity risk premium, Erik Brynjolfsson, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, facts on the ground, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gentrification, Goodhart's law, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, inflation targeting, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job-hopping, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, market design, Martin Wolf, megacity, mittelstand, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shock, patent troll, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, price discrimination, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, remote working, rent-seeking, replication crisis, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Sam Peltzman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skeuomorphism, social distancing, superstar cities, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, urban planning, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, work culture , X Prize, Y2K

The rapid growth of vast tech companies in the past decade is an important part of the story, but it is not the whole story. Nor is intangible investment a minor extension of R&D. Innovation in industries that were most hit by COVID-19 (retail, entertainment, hotels, and restaurants) is not included in the R&D data because those sectors do almost no R&D. Instead, they invest in intangible assets: training, marketing, design, and business processes. And the companies that do R&D do it in harness with a host of other intangible assets, such as marketing spending on new pharmaceuticals. Indeed, the change in R&D is itself remarkable, as Efraim Benmelech, Janice Eberly, Dimitris Papanikolaou, and Joshua Krieger have documented.41 In the United States, pharmaceutical firms account for around a dollar of every ten dollars of R&D spending (up from thirty cents of every ten dollars during the 1970s).


pages: 357 words: 95,986

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

This personalised environmental ethic is exemplified in localist food politics – in particular, in the moral (and price) premium placed on locally grown food. Here we find ecologically motivated arguments (for reducing energy expenditure by reducing the distances over which food is transported, for example) combined with class differentiation (in the form of marketing designed to promote identification with organic food). Similarly, complex problems are condensed into poorly formulated shorthand. For instance, the idea of ‘food miles’ – identifying the distances that food products have travelled, so as to reduce carbon outputs – appears a reasonable one. The problem is that it is all too often taken to be sufficient on its own as a guide to ethical action.


pages: 327 words: 90,542

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Instead of allowing for replacement based on failure or innovation, products were designed with a limited useful life so as to increase consumption. With the US car market approaching saturation, GM chairman Alfred Sloan initiated annual design changes to encourage drivers to replace their vehicles frequently. In his 1960 book The Waste Makers, Vance Packard coined the term “obsolescence of desirability”: marketing designed to wear out a product in the owner's mind. New technologies were promoted as superior or modern, creating demand. Gramophone records were replaced successively by cassette tapes, CDs, MP3s, and digital media such as iTunes and live streaming. Some thirty years after it was displaced, analog vinyl re-emerged as an expensive, fashionable niche product, completing the cycle.


pages: 372 words: 89,876

The Connected Company by Dave Gray, Thomas Vander Wal

A Pattern Language, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, folksonomy, Googley, index card, industrial cluster, interchangeable parts, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, loose coupling, low cost airline, market design, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, power law, profit maximization, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Vanguard fund, web application, WikiLeaks, work culture , Zipcar

Efficiencies of scale are balanced by the burdens of bureaucracy. Divisions become silos, disconnected from each other. Overhead costs increase with size. Eventually, the company reaches a point where the costs of control exceed the benefits of further growth, or the company becomes too internally focused and loses touch with the market. Design for Connection A connected company is a complex, adaptive system that functions more like an organism than a machine. To design connected companies, we must think of the company as a complex set of connections and potential connections: a distributed organism with brains, eyes, and ears everywhere, whether they are employees, partners, customers, or suppliers.


pages: 406 words: 88,820

Television disrupted: the transition from network to networked TV by Shelly Palmer

AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, call centre, commoditize, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, folksonomy, Golden age of television, hypertext link, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, James Watt: steam engine, Leonard Kleinrock, linear programming, Marc Andreessen, market design, Metcalfe’s law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, recommendation engine, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, yield management

In this context it is referring to the picture tube of a traditional NTSC television set. DA Digital to Analog Converter (also DAC) Delphi One of the original online services. Demographics Classifications of populations according to sex, age, race, ethnicity, income, etc. Designated Market Areas A C. Nielsen’s geographic market designation which defines each television market exclusive of others based on measurable viewing patterns. Every county or split county in the United States is assigned exclusively to one DMA. Destination Television A marketing term that usually refers to scheduled, linear broadcast programming that people must watch at a certain time.


High-Frequency Trading by David Easley, Marcos López de Prado, Maureen O'Hara

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, computer vision, continuous double auction, dark matter, discrete time, finite state, fixed income, Flash crash, High speed trading, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Large Hadron Collider, latency arbitrage, margin call, market design, market fragmentation, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, martingale, National best bid and offer, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, power law, price discovery process, price discrimination, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, Tobin tax, transaction costs, two-sided market, yield curve

Be it in equities, foreign exchange, futures or commodities, high-frequency traders provide not only the bulk of volume in these markets, but also most liquidity provision. In so doing, high-frequency trading has changed how individual markets operate and how markets dynamically interact. In this book, we give a comprehensive overview of high-frequency trading, and its implications for investors, market designers, researchers and regulators. Our view is that HFT is not technology run amok, but rather a natural evolution of markets towards greater technological sophistication. Because markets have changed, so, too, must the way that traders behave, and the way that regulators operate. Low-frequency traders (shorthand for everyone who does not have their own highperformance computers and co-located servers) need to understand how high-speed markets work in order to get effective execution, minimise trade slippage and manage risk.


pages: 321 words: 90,247

Lights Out in Wonderland by Dbc Pierre

Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, dark matter, haute cuisine, market design, Prenzlauer Berg, stem cell

He grew troubled, I watched him change. His sense of himself came to rely wholly on the flow of goods and credit. Profit smashed me through that glass, not him. And the infection soon laid him waste. I confirmed it years later when he saw the book of Frederick and sneered. The pointless mouse found a niche in the market, designed a product to fill it—then gave it away for free. A loser’s guidebook, Dad called it. My father had embraced capitalism. It was the system that said he didn’t have to grow up. That said he could just be his child’s best friend. The same system that’s now asking what have things come to.* What things came to is that for thirty years there were no parents.


pages: 304 words: 90,084

Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change by Dieter Helm

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boris Johnson, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion charging, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, electricity market, Extinction Rebellion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jevons paradox, lockdown, market design, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, North Sea oil, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, price mechanism, quantitative easing, remote working, reshoring, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, systems thinking, Thomas Malthus

The bidders would offer what they can guarantee to supply when called upon. They would be paid the clearing price in the auction for their capacity offered to the system. It is a fixed income, against a fixed cost, and therefore properly backs the financing of the new investments. The way this integrates the intermittent renewables is critical to the market design. Renewables bidders would offer equivalent firm power (EFP). This would be less than 100 per cent firm power because they cannot always guarantee to deliver. The wind might not blow, or it might blow too much. The value of the renewables capacity would be adjusted to take account of their smaller contribution to the system.


pages: 389 words: 98,487

The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor, and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car by Tim Harford

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, collective bargaining, congestion charging, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, market design, Martin Wolf, moral hazard, new economy, Pearl River Delta, price discrimination, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, random walk, rent-seeking, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, special economic zone, spectrum auction, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Vickrey auction

Joskow, Richard Schmalensee, and Elizabeth Bailey, “The Market for Sulfur Dioxide Emissions,” American Economic Review 8, no. 4 (Sept. 1998): 669–85. The Chinese program is explained in “A Great Leap Forward,” The Economist, May 9, 2002. For a design intended to work on a global level see Peter Cramton and Suzi Kerr, “Tradeable Carbon Permit Auctions” (working paper, University of Maryland, 1998), http:// www.market-design.com/files/98wp-tradeable-carbon-permit-auctions.pdf. Paul Klemperer, the auction designer who features in chapter 7, helped to design an auction for the United Kingdom government to kick-start their program of tradable emission permits. Anyone doubting my statement that “economists have long been in the forefront of analyzing environmental problems” will be surprised to hear that one of the first environmentalists was also one of the first and most famous economists, Thomas Malthus, whose study of overpopulation was published in 1798.


pages: 269 words: 104,430

Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives by Catherine Lutz, Anne Lutz Fernandez

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, car-free, carbon footprint, collateralized debt obligation, congestion pricing, failed state, feminist movement, Ford Model T, fudge factor, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, inventory management, Lewis Mumford, market design, market fundamentalism, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, oil shock, peak oil, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, traffic fines, traumatic brain injury, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Zipcar

On one blue-skied day in June 2008, the “Lake” was dotted with orange cones delineating courses for acceleration, turning, and braking tests as GM employees prepared for the busload of journalists to whom they were about to introduce Chevy’s newest vehicle, the Traverse. Along with roughly a dozen automotive journalists, most from regional newspaper chains, we hopped off the courtesy bus, looped “All Access VIP” 178 Carjacked passes around our necks, and entered a hall where our group was greeted by at least as many members of Chevrolet’s marketing, design, and engineering staff before settling in for a PowerPoint presentation. Chevy executives enthusiastically touted the innovations and attractions of this, GM’s latest “crossover utility” (crossover being the marketing term invented to avoid calling a vehicle an SUV or a station wagon, even as consumers often cannot tell them apart).


pages: 463 words: 105,197

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society by Eric Posner, E. Weyl

3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, augmented reality, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Branko Milanovic, business process, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, feminist movement, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gamification, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global macro, global supply chain, guest worker program, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, market bubble, market design, market friction, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, negative equity, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, plutocrats, pre–internet, radical decentralization, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Rory Sutherland, search costs, Second Machine Age, second-price auction, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, telepresence, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, women in the workforce, Zipcar

The housing markets that come closest to being perfectly competitive are those in large cities where houses frequently become available and many people are looking to buy. Yet as anyone who has bought or sold a house in such a place knows, the system is far from perfect. Houses differ in location, amenities, views, light, and so forth. They are far from homogenous, nothing like grain (whose homogeneity is itself the result of careful market design).31 The failure to reach a deal can mean months of delay while buyers look for other houses that might meet their needs. This means that buyers and sellers both have significant bargaining power. Each party works hard to ascertain what the other would be willing to pay or accept and jockeys for the best price possible.


pages: 335 words: 96,002

WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World by Craig Kielburger, Holly Branson, Marc Kielburger, Sir Richard Branson, Sheryl Sandberg

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, blood diamond, Boeing 747, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, Colonization of Mars, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, energy transition, family office, food desert, future of work, global village, impact investing, inventory management, James Dyson, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, market design, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, pre–internet, retail therapy, Salesforce, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Virgin Galactic, working poor, Y Combinator

With skeptical consumers wary of the kind of cause washing we talked about earlier—those less altruistic companies looking to fake it—I don't blame them. Together we realized that Fossil's greatest asset isn't money; it's people. In fact, this is true of most every company. Fossil offered us its marketing, design, and e-commerce experts to consult with our artisan teams in Kenya and Ecuador. They hosted workshops for our teams at Fossil headquarters in Dallas to show us how artisans could add leatherwork to their handbags. Glass beads from the Maasai Mara could adorn Fossil's watch straps. Artisans design collaborations now sit in Fossil's storefront windows, another asset leveraged.


pages: 344 words: 96,020

Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success by Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, DevOps, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, minimum viable product, multi-armed bandit, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, working poor, Y Combinator, young professional

It also leads the acquisition of promising digital start-ups, such as mobile fashion search app Stylr, and social recipe aggregator Yumprint, and works to integrate their technology and talent into Walmart’s digital offerings. It’s important to emphasize that even when teams are given independent authority, they need the strong backing of top management in order to navigate the internal sensitivities and frictions that can arise between product, marketing, design, and engineering specialists who have their own notions of what’s important and the “right way” to do things. MELDING MINDS AND DISMISSING LORE It’s not unusual for someone setting up a growth team for the first time within a company to encounter some initial resistance. For most companies—the exception being the earliest stage start-ups where organizational silos and norms have yet to crystallize—setting up a growth team, or set of teams, will involve either a significant realignment of personnel and reporting structures or a rededication of some of people’s time and shifting of their responsibilities, either in an ongoing capacity or for the duration of a specific growth mission.


pages: 322 words: 100,632

The Tunnel Through Time: A New Route for an Old London Journey by Gillian Tindall

clean water, congestion charging, Crossrail, index card, John Snow's cholera map, market design, megaproject, New Journalism, New Urbanism, railway mania, urban sprawl

However, ships did not much use it, wharves filled up with ramshackle buildings and refuse dumps – and more latrines – and in the 1730s defeat was generally admitted. The same fate overcame the Fleet that had befallen the smaller Wallbrook river centuries before. In several stages, the lower part of the river, which had become nothing but a large open drain, was covered over, and in the middle of the eighteenth century a new arcaded market, the Fleet Market, designed by George Dance the Elder, was built on top of it. But parts of the higher reaches, through crowded Clerkenwell, remained open to the sky between overshadowing buildings, and the charges of filth and disreputableness now displaced themselves to there. It is probably no coincidence, however, that at just the same period when part of the Fleet and its squalid surroundings were disappearing, the complaints began about the St Giles-in-the-Fields area, and grew louder as the eighteenth century went by.


pages: 326 words: 106,053

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 13, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, classic study, congestion pricing, coronavirus, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, experimental economics, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Howard Rheingold, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, interchangeable parts, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, market clearing, market design, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, offshore financial centre, Picturephone, prediction markets, profit maximization, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, vertical integration, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

But there’s reason to wonder if a market such as the betting market—one that allowed the people participating in it to rely on many different kinds of information, including but not limited to polls—might at the very least offer a competitive alternative to Gallup. That’s why the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM) project was created. Founded in 1988 and run by the College of Business at the University of Iowa, the IEM features a host of markets designed to predict the outcomes of elections—presidential, congressional, gubernatorial, and foreign. Open to anyone who wants to participate, the IEM allows people to buy and sell futures “contracts” based on how they think a given candidate will do in an upcoming election. While the IEM offers many different types of contracts, two are most common.


pages: 398 words: 105,032

Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/or Ruin Everything by Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, connected car, CRISPR, data science, disinformation, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Google Glasses, hydraulic fracturing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, market design, megaproject, megastructure, microbiome, moral hazard, multiplanetary species, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, personalized medicine, placebo effect, printed gun, Project Plowshare, QR code, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Skype, space junk, stem cell, synthetic biology, Tunguska event, Virgin Galactic

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Piscataway, N.J.: IEEE Publishing, 2013. Rose, David. Enchanted Objects: Innovation, Design, and the Future of Technology. New York: Scribner, 2015. Roth, Alvin E. Who Gets What—and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design. Boston: Eamon Dolan/Mariner Books, 2016. Rubenstein, M. “Emissions from the Cement Industry.” State of the Planet. Earth Institute. Columbia University. May 9, 2012. blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2012/05/09/emissions-from-the-cement-industry. Rubenstein, M., Cornejo, A., and Nagpal, R. “Programmable Self-Assembly in a Thousand-Robot Swarm.”


pages: 398 words: 108,889

The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth by Eric M. Jackson

bank run, business process, call centre, creative destruction, disintermediation, Elon Musk, index fund, Internet Archive, iterative process, Joseph Schumpeter, market design, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, moral hazard, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the new new thing, Turing test

But I had a lingering sense that dramatic change was about to unfold for our young company, that the entrepreneurial adventure I naively joined as Peter and I strolled through San Francisco’s marina district many months earlier was now coming to an end. I left from the Arctic Circle’s back exit and steered clear of the T-shirt box. The day’s meeting marathon continued at three o’clock in Sacks’s office. The marketing, design, and international teams, about twenty people in all, packed into his sparse and functional workspace. Sacks began with a nervous chuckle and a couple of informal remarks. He then addressed the reasons behind his push to resume negotiations with eBay, characterizing them as a response to feedback from within the company.


pages: 431 words: 107,868

The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future by Levi Tillemann

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, car-free, carbon footprint, clean tech, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demand response, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, foreign exchange controls, gigafactory, global value chain, high-speed rail, hydrogen economy, index card, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kickstarter, manufacturing employment, market design, megacity, Nixon shock, obamacare, off-the-grid, oil shock, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, RFID, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, smart cities, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Unsafe at Any Speed, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The overwhelming odds are that the car of the future will drive on electricity in some form or another, and eventually it will be less car than robot. In other words, it will drive itself. It is a race that will unfold over the course of decades, but the early leaders are already clear. Ultimate victory will hinge on technology, but also a country’s internal politics and its institutional understanding of policy tools and market design. Consistency of purpose and partnership between the public and private sectors will be a hallmark of success. But luck and, perhaps surprisingly, honesty will also have something to do with it. Rules of the Road We are on the frontier of an exciting new age. But for America to get there will require a recognition of the powerful potential for symbiosis between market and state.


pages: 416 words: 106,582

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman

23andMe, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biofilm, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data acquisition, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Garrett Hardin, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, market design, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, power law, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Satyajit Das, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, security theater, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, sugar pill, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Few realize, so far, that life code is spreading across industries, economies, countries, and cultures. As we begin to rewrite existing life, strange things evolve. Bacteria can be programmed to solve Sudoku puzzles. Viruses begin to create electronic circuits. As we write life from scratch, J. Craig Venter, Hamilton Smith, et al., partner with Exxon to try to change the world’s energy markets. Designer genes introduced by retroviruses, organs built from scratch, the first synthetic cells—these are further examples of massive change. We see more and more products derived from life code changing fields as diverse as energy, textiles, chemicals, IT, vaccines, medicines, space exploration, agriculture, fashion, finance, and real estate.


pages: 240 words: 109,474

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner

AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, book scanning, Colossal Cave Adventure, Columbine, corporate governance, Free Software Foundation, game design, glass ceiling, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Marc Andreessen, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Neal Stephenson, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, slashdot, Snow Crash, software patent, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, X Prize

“Forget about it,” Carmack snapped. More new tensions began to surface. With the extra levels ordered by Scott, the id guys were putting in sixteen-hour days, seven days a week. Kevin and Jay did ease the burden somewhat. Kevin was able to assist Adrian with the character work, as well as help out with some packaging and marketing designs. As CEO, Jay’s main asset wasn’t so much strategizing the company as being the office “biz guy.” He made sure there was enough computer paper, enough disks, enough toilet paper, enough pizza. He made sure bills got paid. One of the reasons he got the job was he was the only one who balanced his checkbook.


pages: 319 words: 106,772

Irrational Exuberance: With a New Preface by the Author by Robert J. Shiller

Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, banking crisis, benefit corporation, Benoit Mandelbrot, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, demographic transition, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity premium, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, experimental subject, hindsight bias, income per capita, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Mahbub ul Haq, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Milgram experiment, money market fund, moral hazard, new economy, open economy, pattern recognition, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Small Order Execution System, spice trade, statistical model, stocks for the long run, Suez crisis 1956, survivorship bias, the market place, Tobin tax, transaction costs, tulip mania, uptick rule, urban decay, Y2K

With quantitative anchors, people are weighing numbers against prices when they decide whether stocks (or other assets) are priced right. With moral anchors, people compare the intuitive or emotional strength of the argument for investing in the market against their wealth and their perceived need for money to spend now. Quantitative Anchors for the Market Designers of questionnaires have learned that the answers people give can be heavily influenced by suggestions that are given on the P S YCH O L O G ICAL AN CH OR S FOR THE MAR KET 137 questionnaires themselves. For example, when people are asked to state within which of a number of ranges their income falls, their answers are influenced by the ranges given.


pages: 356 words: 105,533

Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, banking crisis, bash_history, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, creative destruction, Donald Trump, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Gordon Gekko, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, High speed trading, information security, Jim Simons, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, latency arbitrage, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, market microstructure, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, pattern recognition, payment for order flow, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, prediction markets, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, seminal paper, Sergey Aleynikov, Small Order Execution System, South China Sea, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stochastic process, three-martini lunch, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uptick rule, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

That meant the only way certain high-frequency firms—such as the scalper variety that profited on the difference between bids and offers—could make money was through maker-taker rebates, the fees they collected when other firms had to trade with them. The trouble for the exchanges: Everyone wanted to pocket the rebates. Every reasonably sophisticated firm, including Trading Machines, was putting orders into the market designed to earn the rebate. That posed a conundrum for the exchanges, Bodek theorized, because everyone couldn’t get the rebate. Everyone couldn’t win, because for every winner there had to be a loser. It was a zero-sum game—simple math. And so, Bodek reasoned, a complex system was designed to pick winners and losers.


pages: 387 words: 110,820

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bread and circuses, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, market design, means of production, mental accounting, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, side project, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, washing machines reduced drudgery, working poor, yield management, zero-sum game

Where, I wondered, was the solid middle ground that offered safe footing not so very long ago? Ferreting out the answer to these seemingly simple questions led to a fascinating journey, from the hinterlands of Sweden to the back alleys of Shanghai to the shipyards of Los Angeles. I met with psychologists, economists, farmers, marketers, designers, historians, cultural theorists, mathematicians, and retailers large and small. I spent a couple of years wandering a world of consumer choices driven by a system that creates the desire it claims to sate. This book explores that world and what role we—as consumers and citizens—play in it.


pages: 422 words: 104,457

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin

AltaVista, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Graeber, Debian, disinformation, Edward Snowden, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, medical residency, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, prediction markets, price discrimination, randomized controlled trial, RFID, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, sparse data, Steven Levy, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

But he speculates that it is not a far leap from our current state of bathtub ads following us around. After all, if food engineers can design junk food to specifically target our taste buds in a way that makes us consume more and gambling companies can build slot machines that encourage us to play more, why won’t marketers design their online presence to manipulate us in new ways? Already, my privacy team had uncovered companies changing their prices based on a user’s location. And Calo speculates that companies will soon find ways to tailor prices based on when people are the most vulnerable—perhaps after a long day at work.


pages: 335 words: 111,405

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z by Deyan Sudjic

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dematerialisation, deskilling, Easter island, edge city, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Guggenheim Bilbao, illegal immigration, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Kitchen Debate, light touch regulation, market design, megastructure, moral panic, New Urbanism, place-making, QWERTY keyboard, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

‘Conventionally, design is used to create objects that make us feel better about ourselves, to suggest that we are cleverer, or richer, or more important, or younger than we actually are,’ say Dunne and Raby. The mushroom-cloud cushion is a mildly sinister demonstration of the essentially ridiculous nature of this process. Our fear of the prospect of nuclear annihilation will no more be resolved by a cushion than a new kitchen will rescue a failing marriage. For the market, design is about production, it is not about debate. Mainstream design looks for ways to be innovative; Dunne and Raby want to be provocative. As they put it, rather than looking for concept design, they offer conceptual design. Rather than treating design as science fiction they say they are interested in social fiction.


pages: 379 words: 109,223

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

Over two weeks in February 2016, it purchased two digital advertising agencies in Germany and one in the United States, and announced that it planned to open design studios in Prague, Warsaw, and Dubai. Worldwide, IBM had marketing offices in thirty locations and a staff of more than ten thousand performing creative and marketing design work for companies. Paul Papas, the global leader of its Interactive Experience division, announced, “We’re raising the bar for experience-led digital marketing and commerce.” Coupled with its October 2015 acquisition of the online assets of the Weather Company, weather.com, IBM made it clear that it was in the data business.


Pour Your Heart Into It by Howard Schultz

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, clean water, corporate raider, do well by doing good, Exxon Valdez, fear of failure, job satisfaction, market design, Ray Oldenburg, shareholder value, The Great Good Place, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor, zero-sum game

Dave Seymour, who has worked in distribution in the plant since 1982, became our unofficial photographer, and he has boxes of albums and home videos of those gatherings. I used to think that marketing was the most important department at Starbucks. Today, I’d say, unequivocally, it’s human resources. Our success depends entirely on the people we hire, retain, and promote. However outstanding our performance in marketing, design, real estate, manufacturing, store operations, new products, or R & D, it is ultimately interpreted and given life and meaning by the people of the company. How well each function is carried out depends entirely on how they feel about one another and how much they care about Starbucks. But how can 25,000 people feel intimate with a corporation?


pages: 415 words: 102,982

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, cashless society, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, delayed gratification, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, gamification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, impulse control, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, language acquisition, late fees, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, plant based meat, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, techlash, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

Today, these forces combine to create what’s best described as “consumer capitalism,” a sociopolitical economic system driven by, and in thrall to, consumption. Consumer capitalism depends on a population that must be primed continually to buy the things that businesses sell. Corporations, mass-producing goods for sale, stoke consumer demand through mass marketing designed to foment desire for products by blurring the distinction between wants and needs. This century’s stunning advances in digital technology, nurtured in a political climate that has been decidedly anti-regulation, provide more numerous, more sophisticated, and more subtle avenues for companies not just to market their wares widely but to target their advertising precisely to exploit and even mold individual needs, wants, and desires.


pages: 387 words: 120,155

Inside the Nudge Unit: How Small Changes Can Make a Big Difference by David Halpern

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centre right, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, different worldview, endowment effect, gamification, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, IKEA effect, illegal immigration, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, libertarian paternalism, light touch regulation, longitudinal study, machine readable, market design, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, nudge unit, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, precautionary principle, presumed consent, QR code, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, supply chain finance, the built environment, theory of mind, traffic fines, twin studies, World Values Survey

Even in science it’s often remarked that ‘science progresses one coffin at a time’, as people so rarely change their views within their lifetimes.12 So what are the best ways of spreading new ideas and better practices? Is it peer-to-peer learning, or new forms of online education? Can we reshape incentives and market designs to catalyse the spread of better practice? These might seem less grand questions than how to address disadvantage or conflict, but they are fundamental to economic and social progress. A linked issue is to focus behavioural science on to organisations and governments themselves. It’s a common question at seminars, to which we have only a partial answer, as to how behavioural science can make organisations work better.


Trading Risk: Enhanced Profitability Through Risk Control by Kenneth L. Grant

backtesting, business cycle, buy and hold, commodity trading advisor, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, delta neutral, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, George Santayana, global macro, implied volatility, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, market design, Myron Scholes, performance metric, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Sharpe ratio, short selling, South Sea Bubble, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, two-sided market, uptick rule, value at risk, volatility arbitrage, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

One very important group of market makers typically carries an edge into every transaction—those who operate as the designated liquidity provider for all transactions processed through a given market mechanism. Those with this designation include floor brokers on regulated exchanges, those who sit at banks and broker dealerships Bringin’ It on Home 223 trading against clients seeking access to specific markets, designated liquidity providers on electronic exchanges, and a small number of others. In exchange for a willingness to act as a buyer for investors wishing to sell and as a seller to investors wishing to buy, these entities typically are able to buy at the bid and/or sell at the offer, thereby creating a sustainable revenue flow that can be very lucrative indeed.


pages: 391 words: 117,984

The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World by Jacqueline Novogratz

access to a mobile phone, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business process, business process outsourcing, clean water, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Hernando de Soto, Kibera, Lao Tzu, low interest rates, market design, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, tontine, transaction costs, zero-sum game

I believe this next generation will change the world. Everywhere I go, I meet young people who are hungry and ready to contribute. University students and freshly minted MBAs from across the globe ask me what skills they’ll need for meaningful work in serving the world. They should gain skills in the functional areas of business—marketing, design, distribution, finance—as well as in medicine, law, education, and engineering, because we need more people with tangible skills to contribute to building solutions that work for the poor. And they can be of service in this area by working for NGOs, progressive corporations, or governments. Our team has come to see the work not just as investing patient capital.


pages: 302 words: 82,233

Beautiful security by Andy Oram, John Viega

Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Bletchley Park, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, corporate governance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, defense in depth, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, Firefox, information security, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, market design, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Leeson, Norbert Wiener, operational security, optical character recognition, packet switching, peer-to-peer, performance metric, pirate software, Robert Bork, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, security theater, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, SQL injection, statistical model, Steven Levy, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Upton Sinclair, web application, web of trust, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

In addition, he is one of Symantec’s primary spokespersons for communicating critical information about security outbreaks to the public. He holds a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP). B ENJAMIN E DELMAN is an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School. His research focuses on market design, particularly regarding electronic markets and Internet advertising. His recent work compares the revenue of alternative structures of pay-per-click advertising auctions, quantifying the losses caused by early, inefficient auction systems. He has also analyzed the stability and truth-telling properties of certain online advertising mechanisms, and he has designed a simulated bidding environment to evaluate bidding strategies empirically.


Lonely Planet Best of Spain by Lonely Planet

augmented reality, bike sharing, centre right, discovery of the americas, flag carrier, Frank Gehry, G4S, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, market design, place-making, retail therapy, trade route, young professional

Built by Domènech i Montaner between 1905 and 1908 for the Orfeo Català musical society, it was conceived as a temple for the Catalan Renaixença (Renaissance). Mercat de Santa Caterina Market map Google map (%93 319 57 40; www.mercatsantacaterina.com; Avinguda de Francesc Cambó 16; h7.30am-3.30pm Mon, Wed, Sat, to 8.30pm Tue, Thu, Fri, closed afternoons Jul & Aug; mJaume I) Come shopping for your tomatoes at this extraordinary-looking produce market, designed by Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue to replace its 19th-century predecessor. Finished in 2005, it is distinguished by its kaleidoscopic and undulating roof, held up above the bustling produce stands, restaurants, cafes and bars by twisting slender branches of what look like grey steel trees.


pages: 382 words: 114,537

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

Fitz The Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself, Peter Fleming Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley, Corey Pein Confronting Dystopia: The New Technological Revolution and the Future of Work, Eva Paus On economics An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith Capital, Karl Marx “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (essay), John Maynard Keynes The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream, Jacob S. Hacker Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty The Economics of Inequality, Thomas Piketty Who Gets What—and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design, Alvin E. Roth Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, Richard H. Thaler Notes Introduction 1. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerisation?,” Technological Forecasting and Social Change 114 (January 2017): 254–80.


The Future of Technology by Tom Standage

air freight, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, creative destruction, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, double helix, experimental economics, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hydrogen economy, hype cycle, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, labour market flexibility, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, railway mania, rent-seeking, RFID, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, software as a service, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jurvetson, technological determinism, technology bubble, telemarketer, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Y2K

In the laboratory it means that biotechnologists can create antibodies with active sites tailored to perform particular tasks. One task they are often asked to perform is to attach themselves to a cancer cell. Genentech, the oldest biotechnology company around, has two therapeutic antibodies on the market designed do just that: Herceptin, which attacks breast cancer, and Rituxan, which attacks a form of cancer called non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The latest wheeze, perfected by idec, is to attach a radioactive isotope to an antibody, so that when the isotope decays, the target cell is destroyed by the radiation.


pages: 478 words: 126,416

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, buy and hold, call centre, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, currency risk, dematerialisation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Greenspan put, Growth in a Time of Debt, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, intangible asset, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, Irish property bubble, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, low cost airline, M-Pesa, market design, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Michael Milken, millennium bug, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, NetJets, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, rent control, risk free rate, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Myth of the Rational Market, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, Yom Kippur War

Few of these effects are intended or desirable, and the notion that monetary policy is anonymous and impersonal is flawed. The thought experiment – suppose electricity were like finance – is not as fanciful as it might appear. In 1996 California began a process of deregulating its electricity industry, centred round the creation of a wholesale market in electricity. The market design retained a mixture of price caps and supply constraints but encouraged the entry of traders, including some with no, or only a negligible, interest in either the generation of electricity in California or the supply of electricity to the residents of the state. In the summer of 2000 and 2001 business and social life in California was disrupted by black-outs and price hikes in electricity.


pages: 448 words: 117,325

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

The third is by mandating disclosure: product-labeling laws and other transparency measures, testing and rating agencies, information sharing between government and industry, and breach disclosure laws. (Some of these disclosures are ex ante and others are ex post.) And the fourth is what I would broadly categorize as measures that affect the environment. These include deliberate market design, funding for research and education, and using the procurement process as a means to drive product improvement more broadly. That’s the toolbox. It’s what we have to work with. The goal of these kinds of policies isn’t to require that everything be made safe, but to create incentives for safe behavior.


pages: 400 words: 121,988

Trading at the Speed of Light: How Ultrafast Algorithms Are Transforming Financial Markets by Donald MacKenzie

algorithmic trading, automated trading system, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Cambridge Analytica, centralized clearinghouse, Claude Shannon: information theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, diversification, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, Google Earth, Hacker Ethic, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, inventory management, Jim Simons, level 1 cache, light touch regulation, linked data, lockdown, low earth orbit, machine readable, market design, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, Satoshi Nakamoto, Small Order Execution System, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, UUNET, zero-sum game

Budish, Eric. 2016. “Investors’ Exchange LLC Form 1 Application (Release No. 34–75925; File No. 10–222).” Available at https://www.sec.gov/comments/10-222/10222-371.pdf, accessed May 28, 2018. Budish, Eric, Peter Cramton, and John Shim. 2015. “The High-Frequency Trading Arms Race: Frequent Batch Auctions as a Market Design Response.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 130/4: 1547–621. Budish, Eric, Robin S. Lee, and John J. Shim. 2019. “Will the Market Fix the Market? A Theory of Stock Exchange Competition and Innovation.” Available at http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/eric.budish/research/Stock-Exchange-Competition.pdf, accessed March 11, 2019.


pages: 494 words: 121,217

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, augmented reality, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, Cody Wilson, commoditize, computerized markets, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, forensic accounting, Global Witness, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, index card, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, market design, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, ransomware, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, Social Justice Warrior, the market place, web application, WikiLeaks

Throughout the operation, the Dutch team would hold what they called “evil plan” meetings, brainstorming ever more devious schemes to track and identify the unwitting users of the market they controlled. They created a list of those tactics, ordering the menu of surveillance actions from least likely to most likely to blow their cover. As they reached their endgame, they began to put their most brazen ideas into practice. Hansa had long ago implemented a standard feature for dark web markets, designed to protect their vendors: When sellers uploaded images for their product listings, the site automatically stripped those images of their metadata—information nested within the file such as what sort of camera had taken the photo and the GPS location of where the image was created. The Dutch had silently sabotaged that feature early on, recording images’ metadata before it was stripped, so as to catalog uploaders’ locations.


pages: 1,373 words: 300,577

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

In 2009, after several years of work, the state’s Independent System Operator (ISO) introduced a new market design. It incorporated experience from PJM and other systems as well as the painful lessons from what Mason Willrich, the chairman of the ISO, called the “flawed, flawed market” that had been put in place in California in the 1990s. This new design was intended to better reflect the true cost of electricity, including the cost of transmission congestion in the grid, and, with appropriate market monitoring, deliver the benefits of competition, rather than design a crisis.21 The major question today for electric power is no longer market design—regulation versus deregulation.


pages: 504 words: 139,137

Efficiently Inefficient: How Smart Money Invests and Market Prices Are Determined by Lasse Heje Pedersen

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, global macro, Gordon Gekko, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, junk bonds, late capitalism, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, managed futures, margin call, market clearing, market design, market friction, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, merger arbitrage, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, paper trading, passive investing, Phillips curve, price discovery process, price stability, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stocks for the long run, stocks for the long term, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, technology bubble, time dilation, time value of money, total factor productivity, transaction costs, two and twenty, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

Pedersen (2005), “Predatory Trading,” Journal of Finance 60, 1825–1863. Brunnermeier, M., and L. H. Pedersen (2009), “Market Liquidity and Funding Liquidity,” The Review of Financial Studies 22, 2201–2238. Budish, Eric, Peter Cramton, and John Shim (2013), “The High-Frequency Trading Arms Race: Frequent Batch Auctions as a Market Design Response,” working paper, University of Chicago. Buraschi, Andrea, Robert Kosowski, and Worrawat Sritrakul (2014), “Incentives and Endogenous Risk Taking: A Structural View on Hedge Fund Alphas,” Journal of Finance, forthcoming. Calvet, L. E., J. Y. Campbell, and P. Sodini (2007), “Down or Out: Assessing the Welfare Costs of Household Investment Mistakes,” Journal of Political Economy 115, 707–747.


pages: 484 words: 136,735

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis by Anatole Kaletsky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, buy and hold, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, Deng Xiaoping, eat what you kill, Edward Glaeser, electricity market, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, experimental economics, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, full employment, geopolitical risk, George Akerlof, global rebalancing, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, long and variable lags, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, market design, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, paradox of thrift, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, peak oil, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, statistical model, systems thinking, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

[The capacity] of an organism or its parts that makes it more fit for existence under the conditions of its environment. —Webster’s Dictionary CAPITALISM 4.0 WILL BE an adaptive mixed economy. But what does this really mean? First, it will be explicitly a mixed economy. It will combine government and business in partnership rather than opposition and deliberately mix normal competitive markets, designed to be as transparent and efficient as possible, with a smaller number of controlled markets, consciously regulated to limit their “efficiency” in the narrow and misleading sense of Capitalism 3. Second, Capitalism 4.0 will be an adaptive system, able and willing to change its institutional structure, its regulations, and its economic principles in response to changing events.


pages: 385 words: 133,839

The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink by Michael Blanding

"World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, Exxon Valdez, Gordon Gekko, Internet Archive, laissez-faire capitalism, market design, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Pepsi Challenge, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, Wayback Machine

It is modern, funny, emotional, simple, large, friendly, consistent, and everywhere.” Of course, such an approach to advertising raises the question: At what point are you anticipating customers’ needs and at what point are you creating them? Coke didn’t dwell on the ques­ tion long. For each attribute, the marketers designed a different ad, rolling them all together in a new campaign under the slogan “Always Coca-Cola” (which had the delicious double entendre of harkening back to Coke’s heritage while encouraging consumers to drink it at every occasion). At the same time, Zyman shook up Madison Avenue by spreading work among different agencies, having them compete for Coke’s vast advertis­ ing war chest.


pages: 441 words: 136,954

That Used to Be Us by Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum

addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andy Kessler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, drop ship, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, full employment, Google Earth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Lean Startup, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, oil shock, PalmPilot, pension reform, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

“What they have in common,” said Hogg, “is superb surgeons with high levels of skill, enthusiasm for the project, an interest in research, and reasonable costs.” What’s in it for America? As long as the venture money, core innovation, and key management comes from this country—a lot. If EndoStim works out, its tiny headquarters in St. Louis will grow much larger. The United States is where the best jobs—top management, marketing, design—and the main shareholders will be, said Hogg. Where innovation occurs and capital is raised still matters. To go from EndoStim to Eko India Financial Services—humming away in a garage in South Delhi—is to go from the most virtual of startups to the most conventional, but it is still striking how much they have in common.


pages: 466 words: 127,728

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System by James Rickards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, complexity theory, computer age, credit crunch, currency peg, David Graeber, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, G4S, George Akerlof, global macro, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jitney, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, Lao Tzu, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, operational security, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, risk-adjusted returns, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, Stuxnet, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, working-age population, yield curve

By 2012, both China and the United States had engaged in extensive efforts to develop strategic and tactical financial warfare doctrines. It was in this context that our group was summoned to brief Andy Marshall and his team on the emerging threat. * * * Financial warfare has both offensive and defensive aspects. Offense includes malicious attacks on an enemy’s financial markets designed to disrupt trading and destroy wealth. Defense involves early detection of an attack and rapid response, such as closing markets or interdicting enemy message traffic. Offense can consist of either first-strike disruption or second-strike retaliation. In game theory, offense and defense converge, since second-strike retaliation can be sufficiently destructive to deter first-strike attacks.


pages: 515 words: 132,295

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. Reinhart, Carmen M., and Kenneth S. Rogoff. This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Roth, Alvin E. Who Gets What—and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015. Rothkopf, David. Power, Inc.: The Epic Rivalry Between Big Business and Government—and the Reckoning That Lies Ahead. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Saval, Nikil. Cubed: The Secret History of the Workplace. New York: Doubleday, 2014. Scheiber, Noam.


pages: 422 words: 131,666

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back by Douglas Rushkoff

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-globalists, AOL-Time Warner, banks create money, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, big-box store, Bretton Woods, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, computer age, congestion pricing, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, easy for humans, difficult for computers, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Google Earth, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, market bubble, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative equity, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, peak oil, peer-to-peer, place-making, placebo effect, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, principal–agent problem, private military company, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, RFID, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social software, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, trickle-down economics, union organizing, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

For example, the single largest sector of health care providers is never discussed in our health care debates because mothers don’t charge for their caregiving. Vital things such as breathable air and drinkable water have no monetary value until they become scarce. This is not an inherent behavior of markets, only for markets designed to revolve around artificially scarce currencies. Different currencies incentivize different behaviors and, hence, yield different economies. Information Age economies will replace commercial markets with more efficient, high-trust, self-organizing social networks that immediately channel appropriate resources where they are needed.


pages: 607 words: 133,452

Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin, David K. Levine

accounting loophole / creative accounting, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, business cycle, classic study, cognitive bias, cotton gin, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial innovation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jean Tirole, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, market bubble, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, new economy, open economy, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pirate software, placebo effect, price discrimination, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Richard Stallman, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, the market place, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Y2K

See also non-compete clauses x-inefficiency, 68 tragedy of the commons, 156, 177 transaction costs, 254 Zimbabwe, 151–152 Document Outline Cover Half-title Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments ONE Introduction Comments Notes TWO Creation under Competition Software �� �� Copyrightables: Books, News, Movies, and Music �� �� The Modern American Newspaper The World Before Copyright �� The Birth of the Movie and of the Recording Industries �� �� Comments Notes THREE Innovation under Competition World without Patent The Industrial Revolution and the Steam Engine Agriculture Spanish Hortalezas and Italian Maglioni Financial Markets Design Sports Profits without Patents Patent Pools Comments Notes FOUR The Evil of Intellectual Monopoly The Cost of Patent �� �� �� Undoing Progress �� �� �� �� �� Comments Notes FIVE The Devil in Disney Everlasting Copyright The Economics ofMusic The Digital Millennium Copyright Act Freedom of Expression From Policy Error to Policy Blunder: Mandating Encryption Rent Seeking and Taxes Notes SIX How Competition Works The Fruits of the Idea Tree Fixed Costs and Competition Indivisibility The Collaborative Advantage The First-Mover Advantage �� �� Ideas of Uncertain Value The Social Value of Imitation Notes SEVEN Defenses of Intellectual Monopoly Private Property and Public Goods Economic Arguments for Intellectual Monopoly Fixed Cost and Constant Marginal Cost �� The Imitative Externality Quantifying Unpriced Spillovers Secrecy and Patents Schumpeterian Good Monopoly The Idea Economy The Global Economy The Public Domain and the Commons Notes EIGHT Does Intellectual Monopoly Increase Innovation?


pages: 554 words: 149,489

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Eyjafjallajökull, fulfillment center, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, managed futures, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Minecraft, multi-sided market, Network effects, post-work, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, two-sided market, ubercab, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

This was user-generated product, and then the products marketed themselves.” Next came a book outlining Winsor’s philosophy. But “my publisher titled it Beyond the Brand . They wouldn’t let me call it Co-Creation . That will never happen, they said. User-centered marketing will never happen.” Pro women athletes had been the first user-marketer-designer partnership for Winsor. And it had come naturally there: “Boulder is all about athletic hacking. Climbers would break things to make it easier to climb. Inline skaters would hack equipment. Nordic skiers would tweak materials. If you have the best hack, chances are it will help you win the race.”


pages: 464 words: 155,696

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Byte Shop, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, corporate governance, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, market design, McMansion, Menlo Park, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Stephen Fry, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

“You could see it in the meetings, he was taking morphine and you could see he was in pain, but he was still interested.” He did make some adjustments upon his return, most of which were simply extensions of the shifts in priority he’d made after his 2004 operation. He focused on the parts of the ongoing business he cared about most—marketing, design, and the product introductions—and he started to take active steps to ensure that he would leave Apple in good shape after his death. This was a process that had started earlier—Tim Cook says that Steve started thinking of succession and the post-Steve era of the company back in 2004—but everything accelerated now.


pages: 490 words: 146,259

New World, Inc. by John Butman

Admiral Zheng, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, currency manipulation / currency intervention, diversified portfolio, Etonian, Francisco Pizarro, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, market design, Skype, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, wikimedia commons

Other images depicted a mother and daughter, the child holding an Elizabethan doll, evidently a gift from one of the colonists; a medicine man identified as “the flyer,” who is shown hovering above the ground; and a squatting man and woman sharing a meal of hulled corn, which looks like popcorn, laid out neatly on a wooden platter. Also, White captured family gatherings, religious ceremonies, burial rituals, fishing, and farming.34 White’s paintings were not intended as works of art, although that is what they have become. They were visual marketing designed to stimulate interest from prospective investors and settlers. It was hoped that they would reassure would-be English colonists and quell their fears about making a life in America. White went to great lengths to portray the Indian culture as friendly, charming, and even familiar. Indeed, some of the Indians are presented in poses similar to those found in the costume books then popular in Europe.35 The chief crooks his elbow to rest the back of his wrist on his hip, looking almost like a gentleman waiting for his carriage.


pages: 543 words: 153,550

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You by Scott E. Page

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, assortative mating, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Checklist Manifesto, computer age, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, discrete time, distributed ledger, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, Higgs boson, High speed trading, impulse control, income inequality, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, money market fund, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Network effects, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, Phillips curve, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, race to the bottom, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, school choice, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, selection bias, six sigma, social graph, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Supply of New York City Cabdrivers, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Great Moderation, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the rule of 72, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, value at risk, web application, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

Just as rational-choice models provide an upper bound on people’s cognitive abilities, fixed-rule models provide a lower bound. A common fixed rule in markets, the zero intelligence rule, accepts any offer that produces a higher payoff. It never takes a stupid (i.e., utility-reducing) action. Suppose we want to gauge the efficiency of a one-sided market design in which sellers post take-it-or-leave-it offers for some good. A seller following a zero intelligence rule would randomly pick a price above her value. A buyer would purchase any good with a price below her value. When we encode those behaviors in a computer model, we find that in markets zero-intelligence traders produce nearly efficient outcomes.


pages: 535 words: 149,752

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, airport security, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, desegregation, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Magic , global pandemic, global supply chain, haute couture, imposter syndrome, index fund, Internet Archive, inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Y2K

But it would take more than codifying Jobs’s thinking to ensure that Apple succeeded. The CEO wasn’t preoccupied with Harvard Business School concepts of organizational behavior. The company he had built operated like a starfish. He sat at the intersection of legs that focused on excellence in marketing, design, engineering, and supply-chain management. He would crawl out to the end of a leg when he wished to and get personally involved, directing each division as he saw fit. Before his death, Jobs pressed to keep the legs of Apple’s starfish together. He approached members of the executive team individually and pushed them to commit to remaining several more years at the company.


pages: 442 words: 39,064

Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems by Didier Sornette

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, continuous double auction, currency peg, Deng Xiaoping, discrete time, diversified portfolio, Elliott wave, Erdős number, experimental economics, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, full employment, global village, implied volatility, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, law of one price, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market design, market fundamentalism, mental accounting, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, stochastic process, stocks for the long run, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, total factor productivity, transaction costs, tulip mania, VA Linux, Y2K, yield curve

The artificial market project in particular focuses on the dynamics arising from interactions between human and artificial agents in a stochastic market environment in which agents learn from their interactions, using recently developed techniques in large-scale simulations, approximate dynamic programming, computational learning, and tapping insights in and resources from mathematics, statistics, physics, psychology, and computer science. This laboratory recently constructed an artificial market, designed to match those in experimental-market settings with human subjects, to model complex interactions among artificially intelligent (AI) traders endowed with varying degrees of learning capabilities [79]. The use of AI agents with simple heuristic trading rules and 132 chapter 4 learning algorithms shows that adding trend-follower traders to a population of empirical fundamentalists has an adverse impact on market performance, and the trend-follower traders do poorly overall.


pages: 597 words: 172,130

The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire by Neil Irwin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, break the buck, Bretton Woods, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, currency peg, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, foreign exchange controls, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Google Earth, hiring and firing, inflation targeting, Isaac Newton, Julian Assange, low cost airline, low interest rates, market bubble, market design, middle-income trap, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Paul Samuelson, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rent control, reserve currency, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, WikiLeaks, yield curve, Yom Kippur War

Tensions between the troika and Prime Minister George Papandreou’s government were growing as the lenders found Greece failing to live up to its commitments, particularly in privatizing state-run concerns such as telecommunications firm OTE and the ports of Piraeus and Thessaloniki. Reforms to the labor market designed to give employers greater flexibility to fire or cut the pay of workers were drawn up by representatives of the IMF and the ECB, translated into Greek legalese by an Athens law firm, and delivered to the government as legislation that was to be passed. That was the situation in the debtor countries of Europe.


pages: 701 words: 199,010

The Crisis of Crowding: Quant Copycats, Ugly Models, and the New Crash Normal by Ludwig B. Chincarini

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, automated trading system, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black-Scholes formula, Bob Litterman, business cycle, buttonwood tree, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, delta neutral, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, high net worth, hindsight bias, housing crisis, implied volatility, income inequality, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, John Meriwether, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, managed futures, margin call, market design, market fundamentalism, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, National best bid and offer, negative equity, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, oil shock, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, tail risk, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

LTCM didn’t see its hedge fund as the end product. Its goal was to apply quantitative and creative techniques to create an impressive financial company. Unfortunately, the hedge fund that would have provided the initial fuel to do this collapsed before it could be done. We were a couple of decades ahead of the market, designing solutions that now are being introduced for the first time: life-cycle savings and other innovations. Unfortunately, I don’t think the bank in Italy really understood this and caused negotiations to drag on. They were after the high returns of the LTCM fund at a time when stock markets were yielding double digits.


Lonely Planet London by Lonely Planet

Boris Johnson, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Babbage, congestion charging, Crossrail, death from overwork, discovery of the americas, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Etonian, financial independence, gentrification, haute couture, haute cuisine, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, market design, place-making, post-work, Russell Brand, Skype, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent

London society, including such writers as Pepys, Fielding and Boswell, gathered here in the evenings looking for some action among the coffee houses, theatres, gambling dens and brothels. Lawlessness became commonplace, leading to the formation of a volunteer police force known as the Bow Street Runners (see Georgian London, Click here). In 1897 Oscar Wilde was charged with gross indecency in the now-closed Bow St magistrate’s court. A flower market designed by Charles Fowler was added at the spot where London’s Transport Museum now stands. During the 1970s the city traffic made it increasingly difficult to maintain the fruit and veg market so it was moved in 1974. Property developers loomed over the space and there was even talk of the market being demolished for a road but, thanks to the area’s dedicated residential community who demonstrated and picketed for weeks, the piazza was saved and transformed into what you see today.


Lonely Planet London City Guide by Tom Masters, Steve Fallon, Vesna Maric

Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, Charles Babbage, Clapham omnibus, congestion charging, Crossrail, dark matter, death from overwork, discovery of the americas, double helix, East Village, Edward Jenner, financial independence, first-past-the-post, Ford Model T, gentrification, ghettoisation, haute cuisine, Isaac Newton, James Bridle, John Snow's cholera map, Mahatma Gandhi, market design, Nelson Mandela, place-making, Russell Brand, South of Market, San Francisco, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, urban renewal, Winter of Discontent, young professional

London society, including writers such as Pepys, Fielding and Boswell, gathered here in the evenings looking for some action among the coffee houses, theatres, gambling dens and brothels. Lawlessness became commonplace, leading to the formation of a volunteer police force known as the Bow Street Runners (see Georgian London, Click here). In 1897 Oscar Wilde was charged with gross indecency in the now-closed Bow St magistrate’s court. A flower market designed by Charles Fowler was added at the spot where London’s Transport Museum now stands. During the 1970s the city traffic made it increasingly difficult to maintain the fruit and veg market so it was moved in 1974. Property developers loomed over the space and there was even talk of the market being demolished for a road but, thanks to the area’s dedicated residential community who demonstrated and picketed for weeks, the piazza was saved and transformed into what you see today.


pages: 998 words: 211,235

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar

Al Roth, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, book value, Brownian motion, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, Dr. Strangelove, experimental economics, fear of failure, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, linear programming, lone genius, longitudinal study, market design, medical residency, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, second-price auction, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, spectrum auction, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

William Safire, “The Greatest Auction Ever,” New York Times, 3.16.95, as quoted by Paul Milgrom, Auction Theory’ for Privatization (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 3. Edmund Andrews, “Wireless Bidders Jostle for Position,” New York Times, 12.5.94. 4. Milgrom, Auction Theory for Privatization, op. cit. 5. Michael Rothschild, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, remarks at conference, “Market Design: Spectrum Auctions and Beyond,” Princeton University, 11.9.95. 6. Peter C. Cramton, “Dealing with Rivals? Allocating Scarce Resources? You Need Game Theory” (Xerox, 1994). Nash provided the fundamental theory used to analyze and predict behavior in simple games in which rational players have complete knowledge of each other’s preferences and abilities.


pages: 872 words: 259,208

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

air freight, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brixton riot, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, congestion charging, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentleman farmer, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, loadsamoney, market design, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open borders, out of africa, Parkinson's law, Piper Alpha, post-war consensus, Red Clydeside, reserve currency, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War

It infuriated Britain’s fishermen, who would lose most of their traditional grounds to open European competition, particularly from French and Spanish trawlers. It was a second-best deal on the budget which would later be reopened by Margaret Thatcher. Above all it left intact the previous Common Market designed for the convenience of French farmers and Brussels-based bureaucrats, not for Britain. Vast slews of European law had to be swallowed whole, much of it objectionable to the British negotiators. Only at the very margins, dealing with New Zealand butter, for instance, did the Six make concessions – and the Commonwealth farmers’ deal was won at the expense of a worse agreement on the budget.