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Gaurav

https://gsood.com

Interacting With Human Decisions

In sport, as in life, luck plays a role. For instance, in cricket, there is a toss at the start of the game. And the team that wins the toss wins the game 3% more often. The estimate of the advantage from winning the toss, however, is likely an underestimate

Solving Problem Solving: Meta Skills For Problem Solving

Each problem is new in different ways. And mechanically applying specialized tools often doesn’t take you far. So, beyond specialized tools, you need meta-skills. The top meta-skill is learning. Immersing yourself in the area you are thinking about will help you solve problems better and quicker. Learning more broadly

99 Problems: How to Solve Problems

“Data is the new oil,” according to Clive Humby. But we have yet to build an engine that uses the oil efficiently and doesn’t produce a ton of soot. Using data to discover and triage problems is especially polluting. Working with data for well over a decade, I have

Trading On Overconfidence

In Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman recounts a time when Thaler, Amos, and he met a senior investment manager in 1984. Kahneman asked, “When you sell a stock, who buys it?” “[The investor] answered with a wave in the vague direction of the window, indicating that he expected the buyer

Lost Years: From Lost Lives to Life Lost

The mortality rate is puzzling to mortals. A better number is the expected number of years lost. (A yet better number would be quality-adjusted years lost.) To make it easier to calculate the expected years lost, Suriyan and I developed a Python package that uses the SSA actuarial data and

The Puzzle of Price Dispersion on Amazon

Price dispersion is an excellent indicator of transactional frictions. It isn't that absent price dispersion; we can confidently say that frictions are negligible. Frictions can be substantial even when price dispersion is zero. For instance, if the search costs are high enough that it makes it irrational to

It Pays to Search

In Reinventing the Bazaar, John McMillan discusses how search costs affect the price the buyer pays. John writes: “Imagine that all the merchants are quoting $1[5]. Could one of them do better by undercutting this price? There is a downside to price-cutting: a reduction in revenue from any customers

Feigning Competence: Checklists For Data Science

You may have heard that most published research is false (Ionnadis). But what you probably don’t know is that most corporate data science is also false. Gaurav Sood The returns on data science in most companies are likely sharply negative. There are a few reasons for that. First, as