Gojiberries (Page 10)

Sign in Subscribe

More issues

When Is Discrimination Profit-Maximizing?

In the textbook world, many firms compete to fill identical jobs, many qualified workers stand ready to take them, information about productivity is perfect and free, and moving between jobs costs nothing. In that frictionless setting—Gary Becker’s benchmark—an employer that indulges a “taste for discrimination” pays for

Generative AI and the Market for Creators

Many widely used machine-learning models rely on copyrighted data. For instance, Google finds the most relevant web pages for a search term by relying on a machine learning model trained on copyrighted web data. But the use of copyrighted data by machine learning models that generate content (or give answers

Hidden Code: Why Do Companies Open Source Code and Publish Papers?

Hardly a day passes without a major company announcing the release of a new scientific paper or code around a powerful technique. But why do so many companies open-source (via papers and code) so many impactful technologies almost as soon as they are invented? The traditional answers—to attract talent,

Tipping Lemons: Market Failures in Tips

Many service markets pay workers partly through tips that arrive after service is delivered. Servers cannot observe each customer's true tipping propensity in advance; they infer it from coarse, visible cues (such as a group marker $C$) and past averages. If a group $A$ is believed to tip

Bad Service: Missing Functionality in Web Services

A host of cloud services are missing the core functionality needed to build businesses on top of the services. Powerful services on mature platforms like Google Vision, etc., have a common set of deficiencies—they do not allow clients to send information about preferred latency and throughput (for a price)

Reducing Friction in Selling Data Products: Protecting IP and Data

Traditionally, software has been distributed as a binary. The customer “grants” the binary a broad set of rights on the machine and expects the application to behave, e.g., not snoop on personal data, not add the computer to a botnet, etc. Most SaaS can be delivered with minor alterations

Is The Price Right? Dramatic Variability in Prices of Generic Goods Over Short Periods on Major Web Retailers

It used to be that retail prices of generic products like coffee mugs, soap, etc., moved slowly. Not anymore. On major web retailers like Amazon, for a range of generic household products, the variation in prices over short periods of time is immense. For instance, on 12-Piece Porcelain, 12 Oz.

Vote Geography, Wasted Votes, and AIMIM’s Seat Bonus

Under first‑past‑the‑post (FPTP), AIMIM’s spatially concentrated vote turned into seats far more efficiently than TRS or BJP, a pattern you can see by votes‑per‑seat, seat–vote gaps, wasted‑vote accounting, and the distribution of winning margins. Quick facts Party Seats Seat share Popular vote

Out of Network: The Tradeoffs in Using Network Based Targeting

In particular, in 521 villages in Haryana, we provided information on monthly immunization camps to either randomly selected individuals (in some villages) or to individuals nominated by villagers as people who would be good at transmitting information (in other villages). We find that the number of children vaccinated every month