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Economics

A collection of 67 issues

Burning ₹168 to Earn ₹100

Tamil Nadu’s civil service hopefuls give up nearly 1.68 times as much in lost earnings (and coaching fees) as the state will ever pay in salary (see Table 2.5 in Mangal, 2023 (PDF); see MR as well). At first pass, this looks like over-dissipation: candidates appear to

Good Enough: Satisficing in Production Machine Learning

Herbert Simon observed that managers rarely chase the global optimum. Instead, they set an aspiration level, a “good enough” performance, and quit searching once they found an option that met it. Simon called this satisficing. That habit makes sense because every decision is a trade‑off. In modeling, the benefit

Credit Where It Is Due: Two Facts About Credit Cards

The Credit Card Market Has Become More Concentrated Over Time In 1987, the top 10 credit card issuers accounted for just about two-fifths of the market share based on outstanding balances. In 2024, "A relatively small group of card issuers holds most of the outstanding credit card balances, with

PageRank Measures the Wrong Fixed Point Under Polarization

Directly evaluating information quality at web scale is intractable. Early web search adopted PageRank¹ as a scalable surrogate: rather than grade content, infer a site's credibility; rather than measure credibility directly, use inter-site links as votes. The chain—quality ← credibility ← links—stacks two proxies. It works when the

The Undersupply Theorem Meets the Extraction Equilibrium

Meta Perspective "If you think about the pieces of advertising, there’s content creation, the creative, there’s the targeting, ... and there’s the measurement and probably the first pieces that we started building were the measurement..." https://stratechery.com/2025/an-interview-with-meta-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-about-ai-and-the-evolution-of-social-media/ Targeting: "Over the last 5

Bias as a Fix for Congestion

Economists describe overloaded labor and admissions markets as congested. Yet the term is usually deployed to mean “too many applicants,” glossing over the deeper constraint: decision‑makers cannot extract enough reliable information from superficially similar files without incurring prohibitive cost. I call this bottleneck evaluation congestion. The concept explains why

A Textbook Paradox: The Puzzle of Price Dispersion in E-Books

The same e-book sells at very different prices on different platforms. For instance, the e-book version of The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited sells at \$25.57 on Amazon and \$39.99 on Google. (You can also buy a DRM-Free version for $39.99 on CUP). We can&

Scan to Save: Arbitrage Between Paper and Digital

Remember when e‑books were supposed to undercut paper editions—no printing, warehousing, shipping, or returns to pay for? Fast‑forward ten years, and you’ll often pay more for a DRM‑locked Kindle file than for a used paperback plus scanning. Case in point: * The Supreme Court and the

Uncorrelated Tariffs

We know the means look a little off (not to say anything about the ends): The EU, like the United States, has generally low tariffs; the average tariff it charges on US goods is less than 3 percent. So where does this 39 percent number come from? I have no