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Economics

A collection of 73 issues

Unbiased Hiring

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

The Welfare Costs of Low-Friction Idea Production

Humans are naturally curious, and curiosity often takes us into domains where our understanding is shallow. Large language models (LLMs) have radically lowered the marginal cost of experimentation in such domains. Minutes of prompting can yield a plausible business strategy, technical architecture, or research framework—outputs that look like the

Compensation With Currency With No Agreed Upon Value

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

Optimally Suboptimal: Behavioral-Economic Product Features

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.

Limits of Harms From Affirmative Action

Stories abound about unqualified people getting admitted to highly selective places because of quotas. But the chances are that these are merely stories with no basis in fact. If an institution is highly selective and if the number of applicants is sufficiently large, quotas are unlikely to lead to people

Missing Market for Academics

There are a few different options for buying time with industry experts, e.g., https://officehours.com/, https://intro.co/, etc. However, there is no marketplace for buying academics’ time. Some surplus is likely lost as a result. For one, some academics want advice on what they write. To get

Not Recommended: Why Current Content Recommendation Systems Fail Us

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: 1. Humans want more than immediate gratification. The systems, however, are designed to learn from

Not Normal, Optimal

Reports of blood work generally include guides for normal ranges. For instance, for LDL-C, in the US, a score of < 100 (mg/DL) is considered normal. But neither the reports nor doctors have much to say about what LDL-C level to aspire for. The same holds true for things

Why Are the Prices the Same?

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

Cracking the Code: Addressing Some of the Challenges in Research Software

Macro Concerns 1. Lack of Incentives for Producing High-Quality Software. Software’s role in enabling and accelerating research cannot be overstated. But the incentives for producing software in academia are still very thin. One reason is that people do not cite the software they use; the academic currency is still