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Economics

A collection of 72 issues

Anekantavad

When I wrote my short missive on motivated citations nine years ago, I didn't ship with examples because I wanted to leave those to a paper. I never wrote the paper. But each time I review a "literature," I rue the missed opportunity to highlight this

First, Assume No Elections

Dixit, Grossman, and Gul (2000), hereafter DGG, study a setting in which two groups repeatedly divide a fixed surplus over an infinite horizon. The basic setup is as follows: * Two groups, $A$ and $B$, each with concave utility over their share of a pie normalized to 1. * In each period,

Pity The Rich

The top one percent's share of US household net worth rose from 22.8% in 1989 to 30.3% in 2023, fanning calls to eat the rich. But envy assumes a high conversion rate from wealth to welfare. That conversion rate falls when the goods people value most

Identifying Assumptions

One of the reasons why I specifically look at Muslims is, as compared to other marginalized groups in India—let’s say the Scheduled Castes or the Scheduled Tribes—is primarily because there have been political reservation norms for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. There is a plethora of

The Case For Pay-as-Bid GPU Pricing

Most GPU providers post standard rental rates by hour and adjust them infrequently. Some expose dynamic prices that evolve based on supply and demand. But these approaches, while simple and predictable, may not be optimal given current market conditions: severe supply constraints for high-end models, large differences in customer valuations,

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