Gojiberries (Page 11)

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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

Back to the Future: Engineering Without Data (Models)

Software engineering has changed dramatically in the last few decades. The rise of AWS, high-level languages, powerful libraries, and frameworks increasingly allows engineers to focus on business logic. Today, software engineers spend much of their time writing code that reasons over data to show something or do something. But how

Make Government Code Publicly Available

Much of the software the public pays for never sees daylight. The reasons are rarely explained in procurement documents, but the opacity has costs. * Bugs linger longer. When the source is visible, independent auditors, academics, civic technologists, and rival vendors can reproduce builds, file issues, and submit fixes. Many eyes

Sampling Domain Knowledge

Say that we want to measure how often people go to risky websites. Let’s assume that the measurement of risk is expensive. We have data on how often people visit each domain on the web from a large sample. The number of unique domains in the data is large,