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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

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

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,

Pastations: Is it Time to Move Beyond Presentations?

In an influential essay, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, Tufte argues that presentations are unsuitable for serious problems. The essay is largely polemical, with Tufte freely mixing points about the affordances of the medium with criticisms of bad presentations and lazy broadsides. Hilarious stuff first: 1. “All 3 reports have

Homing in on the Home Advantage

A recent piece on ESPNCricinfo analyses the DRS data and argues that cricket should do away with neutral umpires. I reanalyzed the data. If a game is officiated by a home umpire, we expect the following: 1. Hosts will appeal less often as they are likely to be happier with