Economics

The case for free trade is based on the principle of comparative advantage. For example, Indians “pay” for Snapchat (and, let’s say, allow it to repatriate the profits) because Americans are better at building it, and Indians are better at producing something else. The example doesn’t land. Indians

In The Bestseller Code, Archer and Jockers learn about the attributes of bestsellers by regressing whether or not a book is a bestseller on features of the book’s text. They find that topics like “human closeness” are prognostic of a book’s success. So is the author’s ability

When hiring for technical positions, people often use high-precision heuristics conditional on relevance to decide who to interview. Otherwise, the interviewing burden would be too much. The advent of GPT makes use of high-precision heuristics yet more important as interviewing and resumes are less trustworthy now. The heuristics people often

Equity is an integral part of start-up compensation. However, employees and employers may disagree about the value of equity. Employers, for instance, may value equity higher than potential employees because they have access to better data or simply because they are more optimistic. One consequence of the disagreement between potential

Booking travel online feels like shopping in an Indian bazaar: a deluge of options, no credible information, aggressive hawkers (“recommendations” and “targeted ads”), and hours of frantic search that ends with purchasing something more out of exhaustion than conviction. Online travel booking is not unique in offering this miserable experience.

Recommendation systems paint a wonderful picture: The system automatically gets to know you and caters to your preferences. And that is indeed what happens except that the picture is warped. Warping happens for three reasons. The first is that humans want more than immediate gratification. However, the systems are designed