Tag: Behavioral Econ

Opting Out of Opt Ins

I’m conflicted about using Zepto (or its substitutes) for a variety of reasons, but these days, during the summer, I think it is a Most Magical Thing. The ability to order pretty much anything you want, from the comfort of your home, is a wonderful thing – and especially so when the world outside resembles the middle of a 250 degree oven.

And so when Zepto introduced Zepto Pass, I was more than happy to sign up:

Quick commerce firm Zepto on Thursday officially announced the launch of its paid subscription service—Zepto Pass—that will offer greater discounts to consumers, ratcheting up competition in India’s growing quick commerce market.

“The company has piloted Zepto Pass with 5% of its user base for a month and seen rapid adoption—almost a majority of orders came from Zepto Pass subscribers within two weeks during the pilot,” it said in a statement.

According to the company, those who subscribed to the Zepto Pass increased their spending on the app by over 30% and showed a 10% increase in monthly retention. The subscription, priced between 19 and 39 rupees per month, for a majority of customers, offers unlimited free deliveries and up to 20% off on grocery items.

There’s lots to talk about with Zepto, and most of all their pricing. For example, at least in my case, free unlimited deliveries aren’t really free. They are free post a minimum order value (one hundred rupees) and the 20% off offer kicks in only if your order is above six hundred rupees.

But as a student of behavioral economics, I found this to be the most fascinating bit:

For folks who know me (and what I look like), the swimming cap isn’t for me.

But that’s not the most fascinating bit.

The most fascinating bit is the fact that delivery is free, but only if I “apply” the “Free Delivery on this order” coupon. In other words, I first pay what I do to get unlimited free deliveries – this is the Zepto Pass.

But that isn’t enough. I also have to then remember to apply a coupon in order to unlock free delivery. In other words, I have to jump through a hoop to get something that I have already paid for.

Why introduce this friction? Which idiot will choose to not opt for this coupon after explicitly paying for it upfront?

The kind of idiot too busy to notice that one additional button has to be pressed, of course. In other words, a person too busy to sweat over the fine print. What’s an additional thirty rupees off a base value that is around two to three hundred rupees?

This way, not only does Zepto get the up front payment for the Zepto Pass membership, but they also get to collect the delivery fee from at least some of the folks who have paid so as to get… free deliveries.

This is, of course, exactly what opt-in/opt-out and sludge are all about.

But knowing what to call it, and understanding why something is done is a far cry from calling it a good practice. This, I’m sorry to say, does not leave a customer with a good impression.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not writing this post out of outrage, nor am I demanding my money back, or demanding that Zepto be sued.

Far from it.

But would I recommend Zepto to you, or will I be tempted to pay for Zepto Pass next month?

Far from it.

Opt-In, Opt-Out

I ended up paying somebody else’s electricity bill by mistake, and therein lies a tale.

About three weeks ago or so, an alert popped up on my phone. It was a notification from the Cred app. Or it may be that I saw this notification while doing something else on the Cred app. But whether it was a notification on my phone or within the Cred app, the call to action was clear. Two days left to pay your electricity bill, it said, inviting me to go ahead and pay.

Now, I usually pay the electricity bill by using either Amazon Pay or Google Pay, but I had no aversion to paying it via the Cred app. I already pay my credit card bills using the app, so why not electricity bills too? The amount that I had to pay looked right (based on what I remembered from the bill that the utility had sent me), and so I went ahead and paid.

And that was that, I thought.

Except we received, some days ago, the next month’s bill. And this latest bill said that we had to pay a whopper of an amount. Upon going through the fine print, we realized it was a whopper because I had not paid last months’ bill.

Except, of course, I had!

And so I dug through Cred’s sections, hunting down the notification re: I having paid the bill. And sure enough, there it was… except, on closer perusal, for one crucial fact. The consumer number wasn’t correct.

So what had happened?

I still get notifications in my inbox for electricity bills from the last apartment I used to stay in. We shifted out of that place in 2016, but I continue to get electricity bills for that apartment. And Cred, for some reason, decided for me that this was an electricity bill I needed to pay. And told me to pay it. And I went ahead and paid for it.

What is Cred? It is a start-up through which you can pay your credit card bills. There is a lot more going on there, but that is (maybe) a story for another blogpost. For now, it is an app that helps you pay your credit card bills, and that is good enough for us.

How do you go about adding your credit cards on the app? Well, you enter the number, you enter an OTP that you get on your phone, you jump through a couple of other hoops, and then you’re set. You get bill alerts, payment due day alerts, and there’s some gamification after you’ve made payment via the Cred app.

But the most important thing is that you have to opt-in when it comes to adding your credit card. It is not added in by default, you have to choose to add your credit card.

But the electricity bill? Ah, that was opt-out. I wasn’t asked to confirm if this was my bill. I’m sure I must have pressed yes at some point of time to a question along the lines of “Can we trawl through your inbox to identify bills you need to pay”, and I’m well aware of the fact that I was a lazy chump to do so. This blogpost is not me complaining about Cred, or saying something illegal happened.

But it certainly is about choice architecture. Having trawled through my inbox, and having surfaced an electricity bill, I sure do wish that Cred had added an additional verification step. If the name on the bill doesn’t match my name on Cred, maybe ask if this bill is mine? Or even if it does, still check if I should be paying this bill (maybe I’ve rented out that flat, and my tenant should be paying it, for example?).

And only post this confirmation should you be sending me a message to pay “my” electricity bill?

This is, of course, a well known problem in behavioral economics. See here, for example. Or open up the Zomato app! Just before you make payment, take a look at the fact that you’re paying INR 4 to the Feeding India Foundation – this is opt-out. That is, Zomato assumes you are willing to pay the 4 rupees, and you have to opt-out of paying it.

And Zomato will not send you cutlery by default – you have to opt-in to have the cutlery be sent to you.

And I do wish that electricity bill payments on Cred were opt-in, not opt-out!

P.S. This is a true story, but is also a useful way to segue into announcing that GIPE is hosting a week-long seminar on behavioral economics. I will be taking a couple of these sessions, and I now have skin in the game when it comes to talking about choice architecture. An ironical thank you is due to Cred, I suppose.

P.P.S I’m in touch with Cred about this, and while I am not asking for a refund, I do hope that they change their choice architecture. I’ll keep you guys updated 🙂

Icing Without The Cake

My daughter much prefers eating the icing to eating the cake itself, and who can blame her? But, Tim Harford points out in a typically excellent column, that approach doesn’t take you very far in the field of applied behavioral economics.

Would we really have excellent universal pensions, a fit and healthy population, and a low-carbon economy, if only we hadn’t been distracted by Nudge? Of course not. But behavioural science is all too good at producing perfect icing for the policy cake; practitioners must never forget the cake itself.

https://timharford.com/2022/06/has-nudge-tempted-us-away-from-systemic-solutions/

The point of the column, and the academic paper it speaks about, is very simple: nudges are a complement to economic policies, they aren’t a substitute. And while behavioral economics, and nudges, are truly important, and relatively cheaper, they aren’t magic wands that will substitute for the time tested policies that economic theory will present.

And that is hard to disagree with!

The paper that Tim Harford refers to in his article is called “The i-frame and the s-frame: How focusing on the individual-level solutions has led behavioral public policy astray“. I’ll cover this paper and some of the points raised in it in greater detail tomorrow, but in today’s blog post, I want to cover an older paper written by them.

The paper in question is called “Putting nudges in perspective” and has also been written by George Loewenstein and Nick Chater. The paper (it’s a very accessible, short paper, please do read it) isn’t a mea culpa, nor does it excoriate behavioral economics and the power of nudges. But it does caution us, the readers, of the limits of behavioral economics and worries if the field has become a little too overrated.

First, some definitions and background. What is a nudge? Here is Thaler and Sunstein’s original definition:

Any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge,
the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid.

Thaler, R. H. and C. R. Sunstein (2008), Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and
Happiness, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Please read the book to get multiple examples of what nudges are, how they have been developed and used. It is an excellent book to read, full of great ideas. And again, Loewenstein and Chater don’t mean to suggest that there is anything wrong about the idea or the way it has been deployed. As I said, they worry about excessive dependence on the idea of nudges.

In fact, they have a useful framework in the paper, which is worth looking at in greater detail:

https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/loewenstein/putting_nudges_in_perspective.pdf

What is the type of problem you’re looking to solve? That’s given along the rows of this table. And what solutions might work for these problems? Those are given along the columns. And the point of the paper is that we’ve been focusing far too much on “I” and not been thinking about whether it really is the best solution, as compared to alternatives “A” through “H”.

To use just one example: smoking. Why is smoking a problem? Broadly speaking, for two reasons. First, smoking harms the smoker, and while one might expect the smoker to be aware of this, they might well end up misestimating the risks, or they might end up preferring the immediate pleasure and ignore the long term consequences, or think that they might be able to shake the habit anytime they wish. But also, and this is the second reason, second-hand smoking is an externality that can/should be addressed.

Now, if you think about it in terms of the table above, the authors say that this means that the problem belongs to row 3 (an internality) but also to row 1 (an externality). And to the extent that you agree that tobacco companies are likely to create marketing campaigns designed to exploit the behavioral biases of their potential and current consumers, you might think that it will fall in row 2 as well.

What of the solution? Well, in a problem such as this one, the optimal response might be one in which we marry a traditional economic policy response (taxes on cigarettes) with a behavioral response (graphic advertising on tobacco packets). Just one, of either sort, may not be enough, and in fact, there is a case to be made for more than one policy response from each of the two sets. In other words, the optimal policy response most likely lies in column B-E-H, rather than A-D-G or C-F-I.

But beware:

The question of how different interventions aggregate is interesting and important. On the one hand, as perhaps illustrated by the case of smoking, it is possible that different interventions aimed at the same problem can have a super-additive effect. This could occur if, for example, a multifaceted response is more likely to result in a change in norms, or if there is some kind of threshold of apathy or complacency that needs to be exceeded for people to change their behaviour. On the other hand, multiple interventions, especially if aimed at different target behaviours, could potentially divide individuals’ attention and lead to fatigue, resentment and possibly even a consequent backlash from intervention-weary individuals.

https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/sds/docs/loewenstein/putting_nudges_in_perspective.pdf

Bottomline: behavioral economics does have a role to play in policy-making, but it isn’t a question of either using traditional economic ideas or using behavioral economics ideas. As the authors note, behavioral problems may have as an optimal solution traditional economic solutions, and vice versa.

Or, you might say – and old timers will have been waiting for this – the truth lies somewhere in the middle!

In tomorrow’s blogpost, we’ll take a look at Loewenstein and Chater’s latest paper on the topic.

Putting the Con in Convenience

Do nudges work?

Yes:

Governments are increasingly adopting behavioral science techniques for changing individual behavior in pursuit of policy objectives. The types of “nudge” interventions that governments are now adopting alter people’s decisions without coercion or significant changes to economic incentives. We calculated ratios of impact to cost for nudge interventions and for traditional policy tools, such as tax incentives and other financial inducements, and we found that nudge interventions often compare favorably with traditional interventions. We conclude that nudging is a valuable approach that should be used more often in conjunction with traditional policies, but more calculations are needed to determine the relative effectiveness of nudging.

Benartzi, S., Beshears, J., Milkman, K. L., Sunstein, C. R., Thaler, R. H., Shankar, M., Tucker-Ray, W., Congdon, W. J., & Galing, S. (2017). Should governments invest more in nudging?. Psychological Science, 28(8), 1041-1055.

Which kind of nudges work best?

Perhaps the most frequently mentioned nudge is the setting of defaults, which are pre-set courses of action that take effect if nothing is specified by the decision-maker. This type of nudge, which works with a human tendency for inaction, appears to be particularly successful, as people may stick with a choice for many years (Gill, 2018).

https://www.behavioraleconomics.com/resources/mini-encyclopedia-of-be/nudge/

Is that always and everywhere a good thing? Well…

The logical extreme is the endlessly renewable subscription. Alongside the familiar bills for utilities, internet, mobile phone and mortgage, our household subscriptions include services as varied as an online yoga resource, access to all the Star Wars and Marvel movies, a Patreon campaign, wine, Amazon Prime, Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, apps for mindfulness, language learning and productivity, two cloud storage services, unfettered access to BoardgameArena and a music bot on Discord.
Some of that will be incomprehensible, I’m sure; 15 years ago it would have been not just incomprehensible, but unimaginable. Yet not only are we paying for all this, we’re paying without a clear idea of when or how much the payments are, or even the method of payment we are using.
In a classic article from 2006, “Paying Not To Go To The Gym”, economists Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier compared consumers paying for health club membership in three different ways: with a 10-visit pass, on an annual membership and with an auto-renewing monthly subscription. The monthly consumers had more flexibility — and paid for the privilege — but they did not use it. Instead, they stayed subscribed for longer, paid nearly twice as much per gym visit and typically took more than two months to cancel after their final gym appearance. All these online subscriptions are plugging into something that health-club owners have known all along.

https://timharford.com/2021/07/why-we-lose-track-of-spending-in-a-cashless-society/

Most students I speak to are fascinated with behavioral economics, and rightly so. It’s a great way to learn at the intersection of economics and psychology, and ask how both fields of study might become better.

But it might make sense to ask if behavioral economics as a tool in less-than-perfectly-ethical hands might lead to less-than-perfect outcomes. And that is a worthy field of study too!

As an example:

Nobody is saying, least of all me, that behavioral economics is “wrong”, or “dangerous”. But I think it makes sense to realize that it is a tool, and can be misused, just like any other tool. If anything, given the very real biases and heuristics that all of us are susceptible to and use (respectively), it is perhaps more likely to be misused.

Always consider both sides of an argument, especially if you instinctively like one side more! 🙂

Notes from a paper about behavioral sciences and public policy

The title of the paper is “Overcoming behavioural failings: Insights for public administrators and policy makers“. The authors are Gulzar Natarajan and Dr. TV Somanathan. I found the points in the paper applicable in my own life, and suspect most of you will as well.

  1. Most modern advances in what is referred to as “new public management” focuses, they say, in institutions, processes and protocols. “Missing is the individual”.
  2. They focus on two areas: personal and professional. My notes today are form the first half of this paper, that is, the personal:
    1. Read and digest basic management principles from any one ‘standard’ text. Keep referring to this book throughout.
    2. Do not lick upwards and kick downwards.
    3. Classify work into three categories – the important, unimportant, and the rest. Be assiduous in following-up the important, ruthless with ignoring the unimportant and letting the system take care of it, and use judgement to delegate and intervene only when essential in case of the rest. Be prepared to accept reasonable or satisfactory quality in unimportant matters but seek excellence in important matters.
    4. Learn that you are part of a team, and work accordingly.

      (What this means in practice is that it is the institutional work that matters, not your own personal glory or legacy.)
    5. Writing is a skill which can be learnt and improved. Devote time and attention to improving your writing. Do write and re-write important drafts on policy matters until they convey exactly what you want them to convey. Think of possible ways your writing might be misinterpreted and change the wording accordingly to avoid ambiguity.

      (Write!)
    6. Be as courteous as possible as consistently as possible in your personal and professional life. Courtesy is twice blessed: It helps those who meet you, and enhances your professional effectiveness.
    7. To the extent that any decision is an exercise of judgement, benefitting one party or favouring one viewpoint, it is perfectly reasonable and fair for democratically elected governments and hierarchical superiors to make their informed choices even if contrary to the views expressed by us. As long as the due process has been followed, and there is no illegality, it is our duty to respect the decision and act on it. We need to move on with doing our work.

      (I am not sure I agree with this point. Or at least, I remain conflicted about how to think about it.)
    8. Never stop learning!
    9. Set up ways for feedback to reach you as quickly as possible, as anonymously as possible and as often as possible.
    10. Internships matter.

      They make the recommendation for IAS officers, but it is oh-so-true for academia! That is, more people in academia should step out of their cocoons and see how the real world works.
    11. Build out your network. Nurture it, grow it, tend to it.

      I am really, really bad at this!

Understanding Horizons, Understanding Time

The more I think about time, the more confused I get. The more I read about time, the more I cannot help but think about time.

In today’s post, I hope to be able to inspire you to get as confused about time as I am.

Before we get to the five links, here are some questions for you.

Should I have a gulab jamun after lunch today? If you are anything at all like me, your answer is likely to be a resounding “aye!”

Do you know who might want to say no? 70 year old Ashish (assuming I live to be that age) might not be such a big fan of I having that gulab jamun today.

Should 38 year old Ashish (for that is how old I am right now) listen to the entreaties of a 70 year old Ashish who doesn’t exist?

Well, if 38 year old Ashish wants 70 year old Ashish to have a chance of existing, I think it makes sense to ditch that damn dessert.

But, uh, good luck trying to convince 38 year old Ashish at 1.45 pm of the importance of thinking about the hypothetical existence of 70 year old Ashish.

That’s the problem of time discounting.

How important is the future, compared to the present?

Think of it in terms of gulab jamuns or interest rates offered to you by the bank, it’s the same thing. A weeekend trip to Goa (38 year old Ashish says yes!), or a fixed deposit in the bank (70 year old Ashish says yes!)?

Now: that was the easy bit. Let’s amp things up a little.

Do you wish your parents had saved a little bit more when they were younger? Hell, imagine if your grandparents hadn’t had that gulab jamun when they were young, and put the money in a fixed deposit instead. Go as far back in time as you wish, and imagine how important a rupee saved a couple of centuries ago would have been today – for you.

But, um, by that measure, shouldn’t you be saving every single rupee you can today for your child’s tomorrow? The argument holds whether you have children or not, by the way. If you wish your great-great-great-grandfather had been more financially responsible at age 27, when he was unmarried and without kids, then that goes for you today as well!

And all that being said, let’s get cracking with today’s set of links!

  1. “Time discounting research investigates differences in the relative valuation placed on rewards (usually money or goods) at different points in time by comparing its valuation at an earlier date with one for a later date”…
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    … says the very simple introduction to time (temporal) discounting on behavioraleconomics.com. While you’re on that page, also look up hyperbolic discounting.
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  2. “Someone with a high time preference is focused substantially on their well-being in the present and the immediate future relative to the average person, while someone with low time preference places more emphasis than average on their well-being in the further future.Time preferences are captured mathematically in the discount function. The higher the time preference, the higher the discount placed on returns receivable or costs payable in the future.”
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    That is from Wikipedia, and as homework, ask yourself if you should live life with a zero discount rate attached to most things.*
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  3. “What has become known as the “Ramsey formula” says that the rate at which one should discount an increase in consumption that occurs in the future depends on three key factors, elaborated upon below: our pure rate of time preference, our expectations about future growth rates, and our judgment about whether and how fast the marginal utility of consumption declines as we grow wealthier”
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    So here’s a way to understand the point above: I was in Europe on work recently. Should I have splurged on a three star Michelin meal in Paris? Or banked the money I might have spent over there and gone for three such meals when I was 70 instead? Will such a meal at age 70 hold the same importance for me as it does now?**
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  4. “When brain science was young, it was thought that the frontal lobe had no particular function. There were famous cases such as that of Phineas Gage, a railway worker who, in an explosion, had a long iron rod driven through the front of his brain. The rod was removed and Gage, miraculously, survived, seemingly with his intelligence, language and memory intact. Before long he was back at work.However, observation of others with frontal lobe damage soon revealed the cost – problems with planning, and also, strangely, a reduction in feelings of anxiety. What was the link between the two? Both planning and anxiety are related to thinking about the future. Frontal lobe damage leaves people living in a permanent present, and as a result they will not be bothering to make plans, so can’t be anxious about them.”
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    That is from a review of one of the finest books I have read, Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert. Read the book, please. I promise you that it is worth your (excuse the pun) time.
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  5. “But there’s an alternative path. Generations overlap, and so by doing more to empower younger people today, we give somewhat more weight to the interests of future people compared to the interests of present people. This could be significant. Currently, the median voter is 47.5 years old in the USA; the average age of senators in the USA is 61.8 years. With an aging population, these numbers are very likely to get higher over time: in developed countries, the median age is project to increase by 3 to 7 years by 2050 (and by as much as 15 years in South Korea). We live in something close to a gerontocracy, and if voters and politicians are acting in their self-interest, we should expect that politics as a whole has a shorter time horizon than if younger people were more empowered.”
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    Via Marginal Revolution, this lovely, thought-provoking essay by William Macaskill. As both the MR blog post and Macaskill are careful to point out, this necessarily implies that younger people should be more informed, for such a system to have even a shot at succeeding.

 

But hey, that’s as good an argument as any for the existence of this blog!

 

*Yes, you should, far as I can tell. But god, it’s hard!

**If you were wondering, the answer is no. I didn’t go for that meal. I wish I had though!

 

 

Etc: Links for 29th Nov, 2019

  1. “When the British actor Jonathan Routh published the first edition of his Good Loo Guide (“Where to Go in London”) in 1965, he singled out the device for mention every time he found one. Only five toilets, out of more than a hundred, held hand dryers – of the pedal-operated kind that, in the 1965 movie Help!, inhale the jacket sleeves of Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney. Mostly, Routh encountered towels of cloth or paper, and quite often, he had to pay to use these products. (“Do loos ever advertise their attractions?” he wondered, while extolling the virtues of the splendid restrooms of Hyde Park in the 1968 update. “Has anyone ever seen an ad saying ‘Just arrived – new free electric hand-drier at the so-and-so loos.’”) Even in the third and final edition of the guide, released in 1987, I counted more instances of electric razors, armchairs and pre-pasted disposable toothbrushes than of hand dryers.”
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    The excellent, excellent Samanth Subramanian in this lovely article about (of all things) paper towels and hand driers. Yes, really. What’s more, Samanth won the Financial/Economic story of the year award for this write-up. Read the book by clicking on his name here, also read Following Fish, and definitely read this article itself. Congratulations, Samanth!
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  2. “And which book takes the very top prize for best of the year? You can’t compare the Alter to the others, so I will opt for Eric Kaufmann’s Whiteshift and also Pekka Hämäläinen’s Lakota America, with Julia Lovell on Maoism and Alain Bertaud on cities as the runner-ups. But again a strong year all around.”
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    Tyler Cowen’s list of books he found worth his time in 2019. As he would say, self-recommending.
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  3. “So what’s a desperate founder to do? Smith impulsively flew to Las Vegas and played blackjack with the last of the company money .Amazingly, when he came back the next week, he had turned the remaining $5,000 into $27,000 – just enough for the company to stay in operation for another week.

    In the book “Changing How the World Does Business: FedEx’s Incredible Journey to Success – The Inside Story,” Roger Frock, a former senior vice president of operations at FedEx, describes the scene when he found out what Smith did. “I said, ‘You mean you took our last $5,000 – how could you do that? [Smith] shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘What difference does it make? Without the funds for the fuel companies, we couldn’t have flown anyway.'””
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    A lovely story about how Fedex came back from the dead.
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  4. “The money of the world’s mega-wealthy, though, is heading there in ever-larger volumes. In the past decade, hundreds of billions of dollars have poured out of traditional offshore jurisdictions such as Switzerland and Jersey, and into a small number of American states: Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming – and, above all, South Dakota. “To some, South Dakota is a ‘fly-over’ state,” the chief justice of the state’s supreme court said in a speech to the legislature in January. “While many people may find a way to ‘fly over’ South Dakota, somehow their dollars find a way to land here.””
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    Oh hey, Tiebout. Whassup.
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  5. “Behavioral finance is finance. That individual human beings can sometimes do silly things, for reasons to do with either nature or nurture, is not under dispute. That they may make these same mistakes in the aggregate is no longer heretical. That is the gift of those that have been “misbehaving” by attacking hallowed, efficient market doctrine. Economists now can consider potential irrationality versus a standard model of profit-maximizing utility without being disinvited to (those wild and crazy) economist parties. Economists can now suggest that cognitive biases can affect asset prices without threatening their tenure.”
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    The term may be overrated – the logic isn’t: in defense of behavioral finance.

EC101: Links for 7th November, 2019

  1. Idea Vodafone debt rating downgraded. Uh-oh.
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  2. “When Arun Sarin, Vodafone Group Plc’s India-born former CEO, was charting the British telecommunications firm’s expansion into emerging markets in the mid-2000s, his home country with more than a billion potential phone users seemed a compelling choice.Sarin wasn’t alone. Norway’s Telenor ASA, Russia’s Mobile TeleSystems PJSC and Malaysia’s Maxis Bhd were also among a slew of companies that flocked to this fast-growing market. The carriers banded with local partners, bid for airwaves and licenses, spending billions of dollars to prepare their networks.

    But what once appeared to be their most-promising Asian wireless market has turned sour. Vodafone’s Indian venture with billionaire Kumar Mangalam Birla, saddled with $14 billion of debt, is said to be seeking to revamp its borrowings amid mounting losses and a tariff war. Tycoon Sunil Mittal’s Bharti Airtel Ltd. is rated junk by Moody’s Investors Service. In a market that had a dozen carriers two years ago, just three are left standing today — two of them, barely.”
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    Here’s more context from Bloomberg.
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  3. “Notoriously high levels of pendency of cases discourage those with limited influence and resources from approaching the courts for justice. Police stations, especially those in rural areas, make registration of complaints and first information reports cumbersome to help them manage their strike rates. Some websites expect visitors to read privacy policies and indicate consent by checking specific boxes before letting them browse pages. The notice is sometimes in an unfamiliar language. Immigration applications involve onerous paperwork that is lengthy and confusing.”
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    Puja Mehra, author of the excellent “The Lost Decade” explains what sludge is, and why it matters in India
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  4. All incentives matter, but some incentives matter more than others. That’s the basic takeaway, but please, I beg you – take the time to read this article in full. Slate Star Codex is just utterly magnificent.
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  5. A fascinating article on the origins of the Amazon battery.

EC101: Links for 27th June, 2019

  1. “Total Expense Ratio aka TER means cost incurred by a fund house to run a fund. It includes management fee, legal fees, registrar fee, custodian fee, distributor fee etc. The major part of the TER consists of management fee followed by distributor fee. The TER is calculated daily and will be deducted by AMCs on the same day, which means your NAV includes the impact of fees on your fund.”
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    A good article to help you understand how mutual funds make money, what the new SEBI regulations mean for retail investors, and how dependent the mutual funds are (as of now) on the distributor.
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  2. “…Say’s Law provides a theory whereby disequilibrium in one market, causing the amount actually supplied to fall short of what had been planned to be supplied, reduces demand in other markets, initiating a cumulative process of shrinking demand and supply. This cumulative process of contracting supply is analogous to the Keynesian multiplier whereby a reduction in demand initiates a cumulative process of declining demand. Finally, it is shown that in a temporary-equilibrium context, Walras’s Law (and a fortiori Say’ Law) may be violated.”
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    Econ nerds only – and perhaps the even stranger beasts called macro-econ nerds only. David Glasner gives us a view of Say’s Law that may actually be (gasp) Keynesian in nature.
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  3. “Why incentives? Economics is based on the premise that incentives matter. Incentives can help by increasing or decreasing the motivation to take up a certain activity, by changing the cost or benefit of the activity. If someone were to pay John enough for each time he hit his steps goal, he would likely begin walking, perhaps even enthusiastically. After all, health consequences are in the distant future, but cold, hard cash can be given in the present. ”
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    That is from this link – you’ll actually have to download and read the PDF. This excerpt is useful to me because it essentially says that behavioral economics is, well, economics.
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  4. “This view goes something like this – there are no priors (in fact, you discredit experience as being biased – after all you guys have been doing development for decades and we still have poverty and misery in abundance) >> and therefore conventions, latent wisdom, and experience counts for little >> therefore there are no theories >> so we need evidence on everything >> how better to create evidence than look for data >> so let’s do experiments (RCTs) or mine administrative data and understand reality and design evidence-based policies.”
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    Gulzar Natarajan is less than pleased with Raj Chetty’s new course at Harvard (the first item from 23rd May, 2019’s posting), and I am very inclined to agree with his views. Empiricism is slightly overrated today.
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  5. “The Baumol effect predicts that more spending will be accompanied by no increase in quality.
    The Baumol effect predicts that the increase in the relative price of the low productivity sector will be fastest when the economy is booming. i.e. the cost “disease” will be at its worst when the economy is most healthy!
    The Baumol effect cleanly resolves the mystery of higher prices accompanied by higher quantity demanded.”
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    Alex Tabarrok over on Marginal Revolution is on a spree with the Baumol Effect, and having followed his series, I’d say with good reason. It upends several things in microeconomics that we might have taken for granted.

Links for 28th March, 2019

  1. “While nightlife and entertainment are certainly drivers of the night-time economy, they need not be the only ones. According to a report released by the London mayor’s office, 1.6 million people in London—constituting more than a third of the workforce—worked at night in 2017. Of these, 191,000 worked in health and 178,000 in professional services, with nightlife coming in third at 168,000. These were closely followed by transport, automotive, IT and education.In other words, the city’s nighttime economy is not merely bars and restaurants, but an extension of its day-time economic activities as well. It is estimated that the night component comprises 6-8% of the city’s economy and contributes £18-23 billion in gross value added to the British economy. The figures are approximations but significant enough for Mayor Sadiq Khan to champion the night-time economy and appoint a “Night Czar” to manage it.”
    In which Nitin Pai makes the argument for having more shops, establishments and services operate at night as well, in India. A useful read for students of urbanization, microeconomics and life in India.
  2. “I think that our economic system reflects our understanding of humankind, and that understanding has been developing, with especial rapidity lately. You have to understand people first before you can understand how to devise an economic system for them. And I think our understanding of people has been accelerating over the last century, or even half-century.”
    Robert Shiller chooses five books to help us understand capitalism better. I haven’t read all of them, and read one a very long time ago (Theory of Moral Sentiments) – but this has tempted me to go and read at least A.O. Hirschman’s book, if not all of them!
  3. “The problem with cricket in most cricket-playing countries, certainly in India, is that the cricket market is what economists call a monopsony. A monopsony is a market in which there is only one buyer for a particular class of goods and services. Until now, a young Indian cricketer who wanted to play at the highest level could only sell his services to the BCCI. If it treated him badly and did not give him his due rewards, he had no other options open to him.”
    I am happy to admit that I got the IPL gloriously wrong – I approached the IPL while wearing my cricketing purist hat, but I really should have approached it wearing my economist’s hat. Which is exactly what Amit Varma did, ten years ago. Monopsony, the power of markets, incentive mechanisms, it’s all here.
  4. “The 737 assembly line in Renton, Wash. is a marvel of lean manufacturing. The line inches forward little-by-little as assembly proceeds. Born from Toyota’s production methods, the process is one of continual improvement. It’s what made the 737 the lifeblood of Boeing in the first place and why this crisis, taken to its most extreme, could threaten the company’s very existence. But the assembly line also comes with a tool called an Andon cord. The cord empowers all employees to pull it and stop the line if something is amiss or requires investigation and needs fixing. The rest of the world has already pulled it.”
    A mostly understandable explanation of the possible reasons behind the crash – but when I say possible reasons, I do not mean the technical ones. Why compromises had to be made, and the impact of those compromises.
  5. “I’m happy for the descriptive part of economics to stay as it is. The prescriptive part, when we tell people what to do – that one should be much more broad. In fact, we should stop using just economics and take all kinds of ideas from psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and economics, and test which ones work, which ones don’t work and under what conditions. There is no question that behaviour is the ultimate goal – to try to understand behaviour, and how to change or modify it. I hope we can create a discipline that is much more empirically based and data driven. Maybe we can call it “applied social sciences”. It will draw from all the social sciences equivalently as we approach problems in the real world, and try to find solutions for them.”
    Dan Ariely on five books that he’d recommend when it comes to understanding behavioral economics better. If you are interested in this topic, as I am, the interview is great reading – and the books too! I have not read Mindless Eating, and will begin it soon.