What I Learnt from Chat GPT
While my colleagues have been using Chat GPT to determine what it knows about important things, such as sunk costs and elasticity of demand, I was curious to learn what it knew about me. Here is a...
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The Irrelevance of Automated Bidding
Around the mid 2010’s Google introduced automated bidding. Other platforms have followed suit. Rather than bidding directly for an `eyeball’, an advertiser delegates the bidding to the platform. In...
View ArticleL’Affaire Gino
Like Tilman Borgers I believe that all behavioral economics and social psychology books should be housed in the self-help section of the bookstore. Indeed, Tilman tells me, that when bookstores...
View ArticleUpdating Polya on Style
From time to time, I return to Polya’s `How to Solve It‘ for advice to give my students. In spite of the passage of time it remains as trenchant and as useful as ever. One thing, however, I would...
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Robust Contracting & Linear Programming
Recently Ashwin Kambhampati, Juuso Toikka and myself were engaged on a project that grew out of Carroll’s robust contracting paper . A byproduct is a new proof of Carroll’s main result which is...
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Sydney N. Afriat, 1925-2021
Sydney Afriat passed away on December 31, 2021. I learnt this in the course of a hunt for one of his papers (more on this later). Unsurprising given his vintage, but disconcerting that I could recall...
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Algorithmic Homogenization
At a recent Algorithmic Fairness meeting, there was some discussion of algorithmic homogenization. The concern, as expressed, for example in Kleinberg and Raghavan (2021) is that “the quality of...
View ArticleAlgorithmic Collusion
There is now a widespread concern that the algorithms deployed to set prices, may `learn’ to collude and set prices above what one might consider to be the competitive level. Indeed, the FTC recently...
View ArticleHow To Confuse Aspiring Economist
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article by Steven Landsburg lamenting the disappearance of `price theory’ from the Economics curriculum. Price theory is what some Economists at the...
View ArticleShould Robots Be Obedient?
It is the title of a paper by Milli, Hadfield-Menell, Dragan and Russell which can be found here. Their goal is to demonstrate that when a human is not perfectly rational and delegates decision making...
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