Tag: pricing

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.

Can Micro be Weird?

Donald Bodreaux has an excellent, truly thought-provoking write-up on the imposition of price floors.

…governments also sometimes attempt to push prices upward. When the intervention is designed to increase prices by outlawing the charging of monetary prices below some minimum, the intervention is called a price floor.

https://www.aier.org/article/on-the-negative-consequences-of-price-floors/

I usually explain price floors to my students by speaking about attendance requirements in colleges and universities. Think of it, I urge them (only somewhat in jest), as a price that you guys have to pay me. Even if you happen to not like my classes, and think me to be the most boring guy ever – and therefore don’t wish to pay me by spending your time – no can do. You must pay me with your time.

That’s a price floor.

So what might be the unseen consequences of a price floor?

Here’s where Donald Bodreaux’s ((quick question for grammar Nazi’s – should it be Bodreaux’s or Bodreaux’)) column gets truly interesting (apologies for the lengthy extract):

Suppose that the government imposes a true price floor in the market for pickles. The government declares illegal all purchases and sales of pickles at prices below, say, $10 per pound (which price, let’s assume, is above the market price that would prevail absent the price floor).
The first and most obvious effect of this price floor is that the quantity of pickles that consumers are willing to buy will fall; the quantity that consumers demand will be driven lower than it would be without the price floor. If pickle producers are economically naïve, this price floor will create a physical surplus of pickles as producers, attracted by the higher price, increase their production of pickles. But even the most naïve pickle producers will soon learn that consumers are willing to buy at the high price-floor not only fewer pickles than producers are willing to produce and sell at that high floored price, but even fewer than consumers were willing to buy at prices lower than the floored price.
Discovering themselves unable to sell all of the output they are willing to sell at the price floor, pickle producers reduce their production. They produce no greater amount of pickles than consumers are willing to buy at the high price floor. So while price ceilings always create shortages, price floors don’t always create physical surpluses.
Nevertheless, because price floors do always reduce the quantities that buyers wish to buy while increasing sellers’ willingness to produce and sell, price floors create a second negative consequence – namely, the need for some means to determine which sellers will be among the lucky ones to sell at the higher price and which sellers will not be able to take advantage of the higher price by actually selling units of output at that price.
This determination might be done by luck or random chance. Perhaps only those sellers who encounter consumers early will be able to sell, while sellers who get to market too late find no more buyers.
But luck or random chance is unlikely to operate for long. Eager to sell at the high price floor, sellers will compete for buyers in ways other than cutting prices. A third negative consequence of a price floor is, thus, that the quality of the price-floored good rises. Pickle producers might attach to each jar they sell “free” coupons for discounts on crackers or deli meats or beer. These producers might work harder to make their pickles even tastier. Such non-price competition for consumer patronage is an inevitable result of price floors.
Unlike with the quality reductions caused by price ceilings, the impetus to quality improvements caused by price floors perhaps seems to be a positive consequence rather than, as I’ve described it, a negative one. But negative it is when compared to what the situation would be absent the price floor.
It’s true that, given that consumers aren’t allowed to buy pickles at any price below $10 per pound, they like their pickles being even tastier or sold with discount coupons. But what consumers would like even more is to pay a lower price for a lower-quality product. Were there no price floor in place, consumers would reveal through their spending that the higher quality isn’t worth the higher price. Yet because lower prices are unlawful – that is, because consumers must pay the higher price if they want pickles – consumers settle for the second-best outcome of paying this higher price for a higher-quality product.
Price floors, in short, compel consumers to buy too few units but too much quality.

https://www.aier.org/article/on-the-negative-consequences-of-price-floors/ (Emphasis added)

And that’s why the title of this blogpost is what it is: can micro be weird?

Demand will go down with a higher price, sure, and suppliers will eventually reduce their supply given low demand. So far, so standard.

But remember that suppliers compete with each other, not with folks on the demand side – and so if you and I and five of our friends are pickle manufacturers facing high prices and low demand, we have to “do battle” with each other to sell our produce.

Facing low sales, will a producer’s natural response be an upping of quality? Discounts, freebies, and maybe the attempt to convince buyers that my product is of higher quality (marketing, branding) – but an actual increase in quality? But hey, that’s why studying micro can be fun – because it is weird!

This is covered in Paul Krugman’s textbook on micro too, where he cites the example of airlines upping the quality of service when faced with price floors set by international treaties. And, the textbook goes on to say, when prices were allowed to come down, so did quality.

So, long story short, yes, micro can be weird – but that’s what makes studying economics fun!

How To Look for Inflation

Here are links to the official sources:

The RBI’s DBIE website.

The latest CPI report on the MOSPI website.

The WPI PDF report from the EA Industry website.

If you want a secondary source with better graphs, Trading Economics is a good option.

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. What I want to talk about is how you might think about inflation.

Greg Ip, the chief economics commentator for the Wall Street Journal, speaks about how he came to deeply understand the topic of inflation when his mother told him that his pocket money would be linked to the consumer price index in Canada, which is where he grew up.

It’s one thing to ask students in a class to visit a website that provides information about inflation, and it is quite another to have a young person’s pocket money be linked to it. Guess who is more likely to follow the website keenly, and guess who is likely to ask questions along the lines of “But why should the prices of zarda, kimam and surti impact my pocket money, huh?”

(Item code 2.1.01.3.1.07.0 and these together carry a weightage of 0.04869% in our CPI. Link here, and while you are at it, look up 6.1.04.1.1.03.0, and 6.1.04.2.2.01.0, and ask yourself some very interesting questions. There’s lots more to ponder about in that PDF, these are just to get you started!)

But there’s other things to ponder about where inflation is concerned too:

If it really wanted to get ahead of the inflation challenge, India’s central bank should have paid more attention to Surf Excel.
The price of the laundry detergent went up by 20% in January. While that’s hardly news when most everyday things are becoming dearer everywhere, the interesting part was the retail price before the change: Rs 10 (13 US cents) for a bar.
Such tiny bars of detergent are targeted at less affluent consumers who are often unable to spend a rupee more without having to cut back on something else. To prevent these customers from downgrading to cheaper products, Unilever Plc’s India franchise relies on “magic price points” — such as Rs 5 or Rs 10 — that help buyers stay within their tight budgets.

https://theprint.in/opinion/magic-prices-did-warn-of-indias-sticky-inflation-but-rbi-didnt-notice/957873/

Read the rest of the article, and if you are unfamiliar with pricing, especially in an Indian context, this will help you learn about the nuances of inflation. You may or may not agree with the article’s conclusions about spotting inflation in India, and that’s fine, as far as we’re concerned. But what we should be learning is an important lesson:

Inflation is about more than just changing prices.

And finally, give a listen to this podcast – and if you can’t be bothered to listen to the whole thing, the really interesting bit starts at around the 24th minute or so, where Tyler Cowen and James Altucher help you understand how you might build your own inflation index. We got a puppy home recently, and I can attest to some of the points made in that section!

Read the news and make sure you keep an eye on inflation, sure. But learn – especially when it comes to a topic like inflation – that textbooks and newspaper articles are only a start. These topics are way more complicated than that.

Joel Spolsky on Camels and Rubber Duckies

I spent two weeks in May teaching a bunch of extremely enthusiastic kids economics and statistics. When I say extremely, I am not exaggerating. Somebody said their raised hands in response to questions that were asked in class were akin to popcorn going off in a pressure cooker, and I assure you that this is not hyperbole.

And when I say kids, I’m not exaggerating either. The youngest was in the 8th grade or standard, and the oldest was just about to enter their tenth grade/standard. Anyways, a lot of fun was had, and I hope I get to do this again.

I taught the kids two different one week long courses. One was on economics, and the other was on statistics. But along with these two courses, there were lots of other courses on offer, and one of them happened to be on AI/ML, taught by the excellent Navin Kabra. People like Navin can single handedly present excellent arguments for remaining on Twitter, and I would strongly recommend that you follow him if you are on Twitter.

During one of the many excellent conversations I had with him, he brought up an essay, and asked me if I had read it. The title is “Camels and Rubber Duckies“, and I hadn’t read it. But with a title like that, how could I keep away from it?

It’s a wonderful read, and I would strongly encourage you to read it, no matter how good your microeconomics basics are. It is engagingly written, liberally sprinkled with oddball humor, and explains a lot of concepts in microeconomics without making the subject boring. And trust me, this is difficult to do.

Here are my notes for having read it:

  1. Follow along with a spreadsheet and try and run the simple exercises yourself.
  2. He actually uses the word Visicalc, which is a lovely little rabbit hole in its own right
  3. The old Excel charts generate so much nostalgia. I’d forgotten the dull as death grey backgrounds, and the horribly jarring pink and blue colors.
  4. The law of demand, the calculation of profits, the maximization of profits, the meaning of consumer surplus, segmentation, inelastic demand, coupons, opportunity costs – and best of all, real world problems that occur when it comes to pricing software, all have been wonderfully explained.
  5. Focus groups and market research are also explained intuitively
  6. I realize this is a post from 2004, but he talks of RSS feeds and RSS readers! I shall use this opportunity to once again lament the passing away of Google Reader, the best social networking site cum RSS reader there ever was.
  7. Besides writing about camels and rubber duckies to help explain economics, he’s also come up with some products you’ve heard of, such as Trello, or Stack Overflow. Joel Spolsky is a person you want to learn more about.

Help Me Understand This, Somebody…

A fellow Puneri citizen sent out this tweet yesterday:

It was hard not to be snarky, and I didn’t even bother trying to resist:

But in my day job, I try to be an economist, and so I have questions. Just two of them, and they’re fairly simple ones. Here they are:

  1. He (or SII) was free to set the price, correct? Free market economics: let the seller decide the price, and let the buyer decide if she wants to buy at that price.


    So the price now stands reduced by a whopping 25%. Does that mean that it was set too high in the first place?


    That is, let us assume that SII is able to increase capacity expansion at a price of 300 per dose. Also assume that it can make a normal or “super” profit at this price – then was 400 not too high?


    If we assume that he was going to earn an extra 100 rupees per vaccine sold, and that he was going to sell say 200 million vaccines to the states, that’s 200 million into 100 rupees.((Where do I get that number 200 million from? Who knows? I assumed that for the 960 million people in total who become/continue to be eligible on the 1st of May, he gets to sell only 200 million doses to the states. And yes, I am assuming only a single dose for these 200 million. Since nobody knows what the quantities are actually going to be, this is as reasonable an assumption as any other. If anything, this is a very conservative estimate. No?))

    I don’t want to do the math, but were we ok with at least that much “extra” money going into the Poonawalla coffers until yesterday?

    If yes, why?


  2. Unless, of course, that was not the case, and capacity expansion will suffer at a price of 300. A raise in the minimum wage will mean switched-off air-conditioning, correct? Well, in that case, is it not our moral duty to ask him to take the price back up to 400? Because if the opportunity cost of his philanthropy is reduced capacity expansion, isn’t that worse?

(By the way, all this is taking the assumption that SII “needs” the proceeds from the sale of this one vaccine alone to fund capacity expansion. That may or may not be true. And this also assumes that this is the only vaccine that SII will be producing and selling, which is obviously not true. Even in this “best-case” scenario, my questions hold up – if we do a full reckoning, they become even more important!)

If it is the first point above, us economists must explain why we think it is ok for those 100 rupees (per dose) to go into SII’s coffers.

If it is the latter, there ought to be a stream of op-eds beseeching Mr. Poonawalla to roll back his offer, for that would be truly philanthropic.

Which will it be?

And I know I said only two questions, but forgive me my greed, and let me ask one more: what is the definition of “transparent pricing”?

Signal: Pricing and Privacy

This will not inspire confidence, but still: I am one of those idiots who actually paid Whatsapp money before it got taken over by Facebook.

Back in the day, before Facebook had completed its takeover of Whatsapp, the service used to charge a nominal fee for its users. Actually, even that fee was a farce, because after the first year (which was always free), you could in effect simply continue to use Whatsapp without paying a dime.

But so impressed was I with the app, and so much of a believer in paying for what I really liked, that I went ahead and actually paid up.

Doesn’t much inspire confidence in my ability to understand economics, let alone teach it, but there you go.

We all know what happened next of course, including Facebook swallowing up Whatsapp, and then the change in the terms and conditions of 2016 – and now of course, the latest proposed change. Which, if you’ve been keeping track, has itself been pushed out to a later date.

Never a dull moment, as they say.

And the whole brouhaha has resulted in Signal and Telegram seeing record sign-ups. A couple of Whatsapp groups that I am a part of have also migrated over to Signal, because of Whatsapp’s (Facebook’s, really) privacy issues, and because I am a sucker for trying new things, I have installed the app and the desptop version.

Which so far isn’t actually going all that well, because all that has happened is I now have two messaging apps and two desktop apps, but let’s see how it goes. Signal, of course, is much more about privacy than Whatsapp:

…our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That’s our product and that’s our passion. Your data isn’t even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.

Now, I usually provide a link to the place I take the excerpt from, as indeed I should. In this case, I didn’t because I wanted to spend some time speaking about where I was a little sneakt. I took it from not the Signal website, but the Whatsapp blog. This particular post was from 2012, and it actually begins with a quote from Fight Club. Yes, seriously.

So, as I was saying, I’ll give Signal a shot, but I’m not holding my breath this time around. Without some way to get people to pay for what they use, things are not likely to work out, and that’s just the way it is. You pay with your money, or you pay with your information – unless you’re Wikipedia, and even they need the occasional helping hand.

That Whatsapp blogpost ends with this line:

When people ask us why we charge for WhatsApp, we say “Have you considered the alternative?”

https://blog.whatsapp.com/why-we-don-t-sell-ads

… and my current view is, there isn’t one. You can pay with your information, or you can pay with your money, but as I said in a Principles of Econ course I taught last semester, you gotta pay one way or the other.

But it’s the other way that I wanted to speak about today, by citing an idea that more people should be thinking about: dominant assurance contracts. Lengthy excerpt follows:

The dominant assurance contract adds a simple twist to the crowdfunding contract. An entrepreneur commits to produce a valuable public good if and only if enough people donate, but if not enough donate, the entrepreneur commits not just to return the donor’s funds but to give each donor a refund bonus. To see how this solves the public good problem consider the simplest case. Suppose that there is a public good worth $100 to each of 10 people. The cost of the public good is $800. If each person paid $80, they all would be better off. Each person, however, may choose not to donate, perhaps because they think others will not donate, or perhaps because they think that they can free ride.

Now consider a dominant assurance contract. An entrepreneur agrees to produce the public good if and only if each of 10 people pay $80. If fewer than 10 people donate, the contract is said to fail and the entrepreneur agrees to give a refund bonus of $5 to each of the donors. Now imagine that potential donor A thinks that potential donor B will not donate. In that case, it makes sense for A to donate, because by doing so he will earn $5 at no cost. Thus any donor who thinks that the contract will fail has an incentive to donate. Doing so earns free money. As a result, it cannot be an equilibrium for more than one person to fail to donate. We have only one more point to consider. What if donor A thinks that every other donor will donate? In this case, A knows that if he donates he won’t get the refund bonus, since the contract will succeed. But he also knows that if he doesn’t donate he won’t get anything, but if does donate he will pay $80 and get a public good which is worth $100 to him, for a net gain of $20. Thus, A always has an incentive to donate. If others do not donate, he earns free money. If others do donate, he gets the value of the public good. Thus donating is a win-win, and the public good problem is solved.

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2017/06/07/alex-tabarrok/making-markets-work-better-dominant-assurance-contracts-some-other-helpful

Will this work for Signal? Can those of us who believe in paying an amount (how much is a function of which country, how generous you are feeling, how much you use the app, how much revenue you stand to earn by using the app etc, etc) be coordinated by a rather visible hand?

I don’t know the answer, but if any budding microeconomist out there is looking for a cool problem to play around with, I have a free blogpost to sell to you.

(For the budding microeconomist, further reading: Vitalik Buterin not getting what’s so cool about dominant assurance contracts, and an MR post about the issue. Further further reading: be sure to take a look at Rahul’s comment in the MR post.)

India: Links for 16th December, 2019

  1. “Farmers cultivating perishable crops suffer more in times like these. The harvest is destroyed quickly due to unseasonal rains, and what survives has to be sold off without any delay. like fenugreek, that cost Rs 8, Rs 7 and Rs 13 respectively at Nashik market cost about Rs 30, Rs 15 and Rs 30 respectively at the typical vendor’s stall in Matunga. Cabbage goes up to Rs 70 per kilo from Rs 8 per kilo in a span of 300 km. Eggplant, following a similar trajectory, is pegged at Rs 80 per kilo in Mumbai, while even at Vashi, it is sold at Rs 15 per kilo.”
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    I wish it had been written (and edited) better, but that being said, it is still an interesting, informative read about the supply chain in agriculture.
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  2. “if the Assembly had been elected on the basis of universal suffrage it would not necessarily have “possess[ed] greater wisdom…”. Indeed, “It might easily have been worse…I am quite frank enough to say that this House, such as it is, has probably a greater modicum and quantum of knowledge and information than the future Parliament is likely to have.” Despite being an ardent backer of universal franchise and (limited) reservations, Ambedkar expressed unease throughout the life of the Constituent Assembly about what would happen to the quality of the country’s democratic institutions once all Indians were allowed to participate.”
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    This might be behind a paywall, and if so, my apologies. But even the excerpt above is worth spending some time over. Dr. Ambedkar on the Constitution of India. That is from an essay in the Caravan magazine.
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  3. I find myself unable to excerpt form this article, I am not quite sure why – but the entire thing is worth a read, particularly if you are not familiar with the politics of CAB in the North-East.
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  4. “Much of the decline in the overall LFPR is because of a steep fall in the female LFPR, from 43 per cent in 2004-05 to a pathetic 23 per cent in 2017-18. This compares poorly with female LFPRs (in 2018) of 61 per cent in China, 52 per cent in Indonesia and 36 per cent in Bangladesh. Nor can this precipitous decline in female LFPR be explained away by higher rates of female enrolment in education, since the 20 percentage point drop in LFPR is observed among both the 30+ age group (down from 46 per cent to 27 per cent) and female youth (down from 37 per cent to a heartbreakingly low 16 per cent). The current and future implications for overall female economic and social empowerment are deeply saddening.”
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    Two articles by Shankar Acharya in the Business Standard next. One on the employment crisis in India…
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  5. “The chart shows that between 2011 and 2018, India’s goods exports increased by only 8 per cent. In sharp contrast, Vietnam’s exports grew by 154 per cent, Cambodia’s by 114 per cent, Myanmar’s by 82 per cent, Bangladesh’s by 61 per cent, the Philippines’ by 40 per cent, and China’s by 31 per cent. Rapid export growth is all about increasing market share. Between 2011 and 2018, our share of world exports stagnated at 1.7 per cent, while Vietnam’s share more than doubled, Myanmar’s increased by 80 per cent, Bangladesh’s by more than 50 per cent, the Philippines’ by 27 per cent, and even giant China’s by over 20 per cent despite trade wars. China’s share of world exports increased by 2.4 percentage points over the seven years, which is 60 per cent more than India’s total share in 2018!”
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    And the second, in which he debunks the notion that the slowdown in India is because of the slowdown in global trade.

EC101: Links for 10th October, 2019

  1. “Coase’s originality was not in his reasoning, but in recognizing that economic exchange is not the mere trading of physical goods but trading rights to property or rights to engage in certain types of conduct affecting property.”
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    Was Ronald Coase the first to come up with the Coase theorem?
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  2. “However, the joy of this book is less in the big picture than in the detail. And what a lot of it! The mind boggles at Smil’s extensive reading and absorption of information. We get the speed at which marathons are run – over the entire course of human history; the growth rates of piglets and weight of chicekns over time; sales of small non-industrial motors over time; the envelope for the maximum speed of travel; Kuznets cycles; Zipf’s law for city size…. The middle section of chapters offer a fantastic overview of technical progress over long periods in a wide range of technologies. I love all this detail.”
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    Diane Coyle thoroughly approves of Growth and Civilization.
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  3. “When a daughter is married, we do worry about her future. But why should I worry when the government of India is my son-in-law who married my daughter Syndicate Bank,” asked the late Tonse Madhav Ananth Pai in 1969, in the aftermath of the nationalization of the first-generation private-sector banks. Fondly known as “Brahma of Manipal”, Pai was the founding father of Syndicate Bank in 1925.”
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    A lovely read on bank mergers, bank nationalization and banks from a particular part of Karnataka.
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  4. “This is where the popcorn enters the picture. Pricey popcorn makes those lower ticket prices possible, And that is why you should buy popcorn at the movies.”
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    Expensive popcorn? Uh, no, cheap movie tickets. Yes, really. Cheap for whom, you ask? Welcome to microeconomics.
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  5. “This leads to the question: Why try these markets at all? This is quite similar to creation of super highways which help reach destinations much quicker but lead to accidents as well. Should we then not create highways?Policies always raise such trade-offs and hopefully, the regulator will take steps which minimise the negative aspect of creation of these markets.”
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    Amol Agarwal, in Moneycontrol, on securitization in real estate loans in India. Me, I think this is not such a great idea.

EC101: Links for 13th June, 2019

  1. “A September 2018 article from Eater tells us that Miguel Gonzalez delivers directly to 120 New York restaurants. As an avocado supplier, he works with farms in Mexico’s Michoacán state. To maintain consistency and minimize bruising, he monitors truck temperatures and how the boxes are stacked during their 2600 (or so) mile journey.”
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    What happens when you raise the tariff on a commodity? Who do you think will (ultimately) pay? Econ texts give you the answer – this article provides an example.
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  2. “Across the United States, a similar cocktail seems to be keeping inflation at bay: Employers are reluctant to charge more, unsure how consumers will react, and they’ve found an untapped supply of workers. It’s partly great news. More Americans are getting jobs than policymakers once thought possible, and wages and prices aren’t spinning out of control the way history would predict.”
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    Think you know macroeconomics? Short answer: you never really do. The NYT provides an example of a conundrum that is keeping the Federal Reserve up at night: full employment, low inflation. A nice problem to have, right? You’d have thought so…
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  3. “Economists have written about topics that we would now classify under the headings of “microeocnomics” or “macroeconomics” for centuries. But the terms themselves are much more recent, emerging only in the early 1940s. For background, I turn to the entry on “Microeconomics” by Hal R. Varian published in The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, dating back to the first edition in 1987.”
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    On the etymology of micro and macroeconomics.
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  4. “Belloy’s misfortune stemmed from more than bad luck. He was the victim of unscrupulous traders known simply as operators, who might sell fake elevator receipts, or move prices in their favor by spreading false news. Or they might pull off an especially cunning manipulation known as a corner, in which they would buy future wheat while simultaneously buying all physical wheat.Later, when it came time for the operator to take delivery of his future wheat, the other trader had to first go buy some. But there was none. The operator owned it all. Thus trapped, or cornered, the victim had no choice but to pay whatever price the operator demanded. Cornering was the ruin of many a trader, like our Belloy, to whom the only apparent recourse was to find the nearest saloon and shoot himself in the head.”
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    Rarely are classes in financial economics so very entertaining. A lovely history (maybe apocryphal, who knows) about the early days of the CBOT in Chicago.
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  5. “There is no simple remedy for the curse of knowledge, but let me offer a suggestion. Keep a particular person in mind as you teach. That person should be someone you know well—a parent, a spouse, or a best friend (as long as that person is not an economist). Pretend you are explaining the material to them. Are they getting it, or are they lost? If you know this person well, you may be able to more easily empathize with their learning challenges. You might prevent
    yourself from going overboard.”
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    N. Gregory Mankiw comes up with a short six point guideline about how to teach economics better. It is worth going over this list, irrespective of whether you are learning economics or teaching it. Also, taken a look at Eli5?

Tech: Links for 11th June, 2019

  1. “Microsoft now generates about $7.5 billion in annual revenue from web search advertising. That is a pipsqueak compared with Google’s $120 billion in ad sales over the last 12 months. But it’s more revenue brought in by either Microsoft’s LinkedIn professional network or the company’s line of Surface computers and other hardware.How did Bing go from a joke to generating nearly three times the advertising revenue of Twitter? Bing is emblematic of what Microsoft has become under Satya Nadella, the CEO since 2014: less flashy and less inclined to tilt at windmills in favor of pragmatism.”
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    A nice (and at least to, somewhat surprising) read about how Bing isn’t an utter failure – far from it. It isn’t Google, of course, and probably never will be, but the article highlights how starting Bing was in retrospect useful for many different reasons.
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  2. “One effect of Donald Trump’s sanctions on China’s tech giant Huawei seems to be a growing nationalistic sentiment among some Chinese consumers: sales of iPhones have fallen in recent months, while Huawei products have seen an uptick. It isn’t hard to find patriotic slogans backing the embattled company on social-media platforms such as Weibo.”
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    The article speaks about the possible “Balkanization” of technology, and one can easily imagine a fairly dystopian view of the future as a consequence of this. Not saying that this will happen, to be clear – but the possibility should be contemplated.
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  3. “Lena Edlund, a Columbia University economist, and Cecilia Machado, of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, lay out the data in a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. They estimate that the diffusion of phones could explain 19 to 29 percent of the decline in homicides seen from 1990 to 2000.“The cellphones changed how drugs were dealt,” Edlund told me. In the ’80s, turf-based drug sales generated violence as gangs attacked and defended territory, and also allowed those who controlled the block to keep profits high.The cellphone broke the link, the paper claims, between turf and selling drugs. “It’s not that people don’t sell or do drugs anymore,” Edlund explained to me, “but the relationship between that and violence is different.””
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    Staring at phones the whole day may actually have saved lives. Who’d have thought? The rest of the article is a nice summary of other hypotheses about why crime in the USA went down over the years.
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  4. “The current state of monetization in podcasting mirrors the early internet: revenue lags behind attention. Despite double-digit percent growth in podcast advertising over the last few years, podcasts are still in a very nascent, disjointed stage of monetization today.”
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    A rather long article about podcasting as a business today, but I found it interesting. The reasons I found it interesting: I have a very small, fledgling podcast of my own, monetization in podcasting hasn’t taken off, and I remain sceptical that it ever really will, and most importantly, listening to podcasts is truly instructive.
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  5. The camera app VSCO is unlike its social counterparts. Though it has a feed similar to Facebook’s News Feed and Twitter’s Timeline, it doesn’t employ any of the tricks meant to keep you hooked. VSCO doesn’t display follower or like counts, and it doesn’t sort its feed with an algorithm. Instead of optimizing toward keeping you on its app, VSCO — which last reported 30 million monthly active users — simply encourages you to shoot and edit photos and videos, regardless of whether you post them or not.
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    Speaking of monetization, this newsletter tells you how VCSO has funded itself – and speaks about pricing in general when it comes to technology today.