Economics

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 end with purchasing something more out of exhaustion than conviction. Online travel booking is not unique in offering this miserable experience.

Many times within a narrow product category like breakfast cereals, ice cream tubs, etc., the prices of different varieties within a brand are the same. The same pattern continues in many ice cream stores where you are charged for the quantity instead of the flavor or the vessel in which

Consider the following scenario: There are multiple firms looking to fill identical jobs. And there are multiple eligible workers given each job opening. Both the company and the workers have perfect information, which they are able toacquire without cost. Assume also that employees can switch jobs without cost. Under these

Many widely used machine-learning models rely on copyrighted data. For instance, Google finds the most relevant web pages for a search term by relying on a machine learning model trained on copyrighted web data. But the use of copyrighted data by machine learning models that generate content (or give answers

Hardly a day passes without a major company announcing the release of a new scientific paper or code around a powerful technique. But why do so many companies open-source (via papers and code) so many impactful technologies almost as soon as they are invented? The traditional answers—to attract talent,