The Real Economics of Holiday Gift Giving

It’s trendy to get your economist on around the holidays and complain about the inefficiency of gift exchange.  Giving money is a more efficient way to make the recipient better off.  But that’s a fallacy that only trips up poser-economists.  To a real economist, that’s like observing that eating an omelette is an inefficient way to get all of the nutrients we need in our breakfast.  Yeah, so?  That’s not why I ate it.

A real economist recognizes unregulated, voluntary exchange when he sees it.  He doesn’t bother inventing some hypothetical motivation for the exchange because he understands revealed preference. If they are doing it voluntarily then it is efficient, regardless of what they think they are getting out of it.  Indeed, the pure consumption value of buying a plaid sweater for somebody is a perfectly good motivation.  And since the recipient voluntarily accepts the gift, even better.  If there was a Pareto superior alternative they would have done that instead.

So this holiday, swat that poser economist in red off your left shoulder, hold hands with the real economist in white on your right shoulder and give to your hearts’ content.  (Oh and I am very easy to shop for.  Just don’t forget to include a gift receipt!)

Brain Imaging = Red Herring

Or dead salmon?

By the end of the experiment, neuroscientist Craig Bennett and his colleagues at Dartmouth College could clearly discern in the scan of the salmon’s brain a beautiful, red-hot area of activity that lit up during emotional scenes.

An Atlantic salmon that responded to human emotions would have been an astounding discovery, guaranteeing publication in a top-tier journal and a life of scientific glory for the researchers. Except for one thing. The fish was dead.

Read here for a lengthy survey of the pitfalls of fMRI analysis. Via Mindhacks.

The Stealth Public Option

Tyler Cowen, quoting Ezra Klein on “penalties” for failing to purchase private insurance:

If you don’t have employer-based coverage, Medicare, Medicaid, or anything else, and premiums won’t cost more than 8 percent of your monthly income, and you refuse to purchase insurance, at that point, you will be assessed a penalty of up to 2 percent of your annual income. In return for that, you get guaranteed treatment at hospitals and an insurance system that allows you to purchase full coverage the moment you decide you actually need it. In the current system, if you don’t buy insurance, and then find you need it, you’ll likely never be able to buy insurance again. There’s a very good case to be made, in fact, that paying the 2 percent penalty is the best deal in the bill.

Malbec and Chocolate

Luca Malbec 2007.  It’s Argentina in a bottle.  The wine is huge, almost black, and over the top in terms of fruit extraction, oak, and alcohol (14.5%).  The bottle itself weighs twice as much as wimpy French wine bottles.

Its perfectly agreeable wine but it has no complexity.  It smells like you just walked into a tool shed and found a blueberry pie cooling on the shelf.  And it is clearly built to stand up to those fat steaks Argies are so fond of.  So as a vegetarian I have almost no use for this wine except for one thing.  I am usually the only wine drinker in the house, so I drink a bottle over the course of a few days.  This wine is so huge that it tastes exactly the same three days later as it did when I opened the bottle.

Now I have discovered a second thing.  It makes a perfect pairing with dark Belgian chocolate.  The chocolate masks some of the oak and dark fruit flavors and allows the slight acidity and strawberry flavors to come out and those perfectly complement the chocolate. These aspects are typical Argentinian Malbec so I would bet this pairing would work with any you can get your hands on.

I found this out because my daughters came home from a birthday party bringing a box of Belgian dark chocolate.  The birthday girl’s father is a friend of ours who is Belgian, so that explains the chocolate.  Now, his wife is from Argentina, and her father is a winemaker and yes, his best wine is a Malbec.  So the pairing works on many levels.

Painstakingly Sordid Links

1. Ethical issues in forensic linguistic consulting
2. “What do you say we make apple juice and fax it to each other?”
3. Chefs on drugs.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

That’s the title of David Mitchell’s forthcoming novel. It’s been a few years since Black Swan Green, his last.  Here’s  the blurb on Amazon:

The author of Cloud Atlas’s most ambitious novel yet, for the readers of Ishiguro, Murakami, and, of course, David Mitchell.

The year is 1799, the place Dejima, the “high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window to the world. It is also the farthest-flung outpost of the powerful Dutch East Indies Company. To this place of superstition and swamp fever, crocodiles and courtesans, earthquakes and typhoons, comes Jacob de Zoet. The young, devout and ambitious clerk must spend five years in the East to earn enough money to deserve the hand of his wealthy fiancée. But Jacob’s intentions are shifted, his character shaken and his soul stirred when he meets Orito Aibagawa, the beautiful and scarred daughter of a Samurai, midwife to the island’s powerful magistrate. In this world where East and West are linked by one bridge, Jacob sees the gaps shrink between pleasure and piety, propriety and profit. Magnificently written, a superb mix of historical research and heedless imagination, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a big and unforgettable book that will be read for years to come.

Here’s a review from someone who got a pre-release copy.  It’ll be released June 29, 2010 and I’ve pre-ordered already. (If you are looking for something to read and haven’t read these already, I recommend Number9Dream and Cloud Atlas.)

We Have These. They’re Called Ambassadors.

From the fantastic blog, Letters of Note.

Circa 1986, Jeremy Stone (then-President of the Federation of American Scientists) asked Owen Chamberlain to forward to him any ideas he may have which would ‘make useful arms control initiatives’. Chamberlain – a highly intelligent, hugely influential Nobel laureate in physics who discovered the antiproton – responded with the fantastic letter seen below, the contents of which I won’t mention for fear of spoiling your experience. Unfortunately, although I can’t imagine the letter to be anything but satirical, I’m uninformed when it comes to Chamberlain’s sense of humour and have no way of verifying my belief. Even the Bancroft Library labels it as ‘possibly tongue-in-cheek’.

Drunk Cycling

In this video, Steve Levitt and Stephen Dubner talk about their finding that you are 8 times more likely to die walking drunk than driving drunk.

Levitt says this

“anybody could have done it, it took us about 5 minutes on the internet trying to figure out what some of the statistics were… and yet no one has every talked or thought about it and I think that’s the power of ideas… ways of thinking about the world differently that we are trying to cultivate with our approach to economics.”

Dubner cites the various ways a person could die walking drunk

1. step off the curb into traffic.
2. mad dash across the highway.
3. lie down and take a nap in the road.

Which leads him to see how obvious it is ex post that drunk walking is so much more dangerous than drunk driving.

I thought a little about this and it struck me that riding a bike while drunk should be even more dangerous than walking drunk. I could

1. roll or ride off a curb into traffic.
2. try to make a mad dash across an intersection.
3. get off my bike so that i can lie down in the road to take a nap.

plus so many other dangerous things that i can do on my bike but could not do on foot. And what the hell, I have 5 minutes of time and the internet so I thought I would do a little homegrown freakonomics to test this out. Here is an excerpt from their book explaining how they calculated the risk of death by drunk walking.

Let’s look at some numbers, Each year, more than 1,000 drunk pedestrians die in traffic accidents. They step off sidewalks into city streets; they lie down to rest on country roads; they make mad dashes across busy highways. Compared with the total number of people killed in alcohol-related traffic accidents each year–about 13,000–the number of drunk pedestrians is relatively small. But when you’re choosing whether to walk or drive, the overall number isn’t what counts. Here’s the relevant question: on a per-mile basis, is it more dangerous to drive drunk or walk drunk?

The average American walks about a half-mile per day outside the home or workplace. There are some 237 million Americans sixteen and older; all told, that’s 43 billion miles walked each year by people of driving age. If we assume that 1 of every 140 of those miles are walked drunk–the same proportion of miles that are driven drunk–then 307 million miles are walked drunk each year.

Doing the math, you find that on a per-mile basis, a drunk walker is eight times more likely to get killed than a drunk driver.

I found the relevant statistics for cycling here, on the internet. I calculate as follows. Estimates range between 6 and 21 billion miles traveled by bike in a year. Lets call it 13 billion. If we assume that 1 out of every 140 of these miles are cycled drunk, then that gives about 92 million drunk-cycling miles. There are about 688 cycling related deaths per year (average for the years 200-2004.) Nearly 1/5 of these involve a drunk cyclist (this is for the year 1996, the only year the data mentions.) So that’s about 137 dead drunk cyclists per year.

When you do the math you find that there are about 1.5 deaths per every million miles cycled drunk. By contrast, Levitt and Dubner calculate about 3.3 deaths per every million miles walked drunk.

Is walking drunk more dangerous than biking drunk?

Here is another piece of data. Overall (drunk or not) the fatality rate (on a per-mile basis) is estimated to be between 3.4 and 11 times higher for cyclists than motorists. From Levitt and Dubner’s conclusion that drunk walking is 8 times more dangerous than drunk driving we can infer that there are about .4 deaths per million miles driven drunk. That means that the fatality rate for drunk cyclists is only about 3.8 times higher than for drunk motorists.

That is, the relative riskiness of biking versus driving is unaffected (or possibly attenuated) by being drunk. But while walking is much safer than driving overall, according to Levitt and Dubner’s method, being drunk reverses that and makes walking much more dangerous than both biking and driving.

There are a few other ways to interpret these data which do not require you to believe the implication in the previous paragraph.

1. There was no good reason to extrapolate the drunk rate of 1 out of every 140 miles traveled from driving (where its documented) to walking and biking (where we are just making things up.)
2. Someone who is drunk and chooses to walk is systematically different than someone who is drunk and chooses to drive. They are probably not going to and from the same places. They probably have different incomes and different occupations. Their level of intoxication is probably not the same. This means in particular that the fatality rate of drunk walkers is not the rate that would be faced by you and me if we were drunk and decided to walk instead of drive. To put it yet another way, it is not drunk walking that is dangerous. What is dangerous is having the characteristics that lead you to choose to walk drunk.

These ideas, especially the one behind #2 were the hallmark of Levitt’s academic work and even the work documented in Freakonomics. His reputation was built on carefully applying ideas like these to uncover exciting and surprising truths in data. But he didn’t apply these ideas to his study of drunk walking. Of course, my analysis is no better. I just copied some numbers off a page I found on the internet and applied the Levitt Dubner calculation. It only took me 5 minutes. (And I would appreciate if someone can check my math.) But then again, I am not trying to support a highly dubious and dangerous claim:

So as you leave your friend’s party, the decision should be clear: driving is safer than walking. (It would be even safer, obviously , to drink less, or to call a cab.) The next time you put away four glasses of wine at a party, maybe you’ll think through your decision a bit differently. Or, if you’re too far gone, maybe your friend will help sort things out. Because friends don’t let friends walk drunk.

de Novo Review by Instant Replay

Via The Volokh Conspiracy, I enjoyed this discussion of the NFL instant replay system.  A call made on the field can only be overturned if the replay reveals conclusive evidence that the call was in error.   Legal scholarship has debated the merits of such a system of appeals relative to the alternative of de novo review:  the appelate body considers the case anew and is not bound by the decision below.

If standards of review are essentially a way of allocating decisionmaking authority between trial and appellate courts based on their relative strengths, then it probably makes sense that the former get primary control over factfinding and trial management (i.e., their decisions on those matters are subject only to clear error or abuse of discretion review), while the latter get a fresh crack at purely “legal” issues (i.e., such issues are reviewed de novo). Heightened standards of review apply in areas where trial courts are in the best place to make correct decisions.

These arguments don’t seem to apply to instant replay review.  The replay presumably is a better document of the facts than the realtime view of the referee. But not always.  Perhaps the argument against in favor of deference to the field judge is that it allows the final verdict to depend on the additional evidence from the replay only when the replay angle is better than that of the referee.

That argument works only if we hold constant the judgment of the referee on the field.  The problem is that the deferential system alters his incentives due to the general principle that it is impossible to prove a negative.  For example consider the (reviewable) call of whether a player’s knee was down due to contact from an opposing player.  Instant replay can prove that the knee was down but it cannot prove the negative that the knee was not down.  (There will be some moments when the view is obscured, we cannot be sure that the angle was right, etc.)

Suppose the referee on the field is not sure and thinks that with 50% probability the knee was down.  Consider what happens if he calls the runner down by contact.  Because it is impossible to prove the negative, the call will almost surely not be overturned and so with 100% probability the verdict will be that he was down (even though that is true with only 50% probability.)

Consider instead what happens if the referee does not blow the whistle and allows the play to proceed.  If the call is challenged and the knee was in fact down, then the replay will very likely reveal that.  If not, not.  The final verdict will be highly correlated with the truth.

So the deferential system means that a field referee who wants the right decision made will strictly prefer a non-call when he is unsure.  More generally this means that his threshold for making a definitive call is higher than what it would be in the absence of replay.  This probably could be verified with data.

On the other hand, de novo review means that, conditional on review, the call made on the field has no bearing.  This means that the referee will always make his decision under the assumption that his decision will be the one enforced.  That would ensure he has exactly the right incentives.

The Ornament Game

Each Christmas my wife attends a party where a bunch of suburban erstwhile party-girls get together and A) drink and B) exchange ornaments. Looking for any excuse to get invited to hang out with a bunch of drunk soccer-moms, every year I express sincere scientific interest in their peculiar mechanism of matching porcelain trinket to plastered Patricia. Alas I am denied access to their data.

So theory will have to do. Here is the game they play. Each dame brings with her an ornament wrapped in a box. The ornaments are placed on a table and the ladies are randomly ordered. The first mover steps to the table, selects an ornament and unboxes it. The next in line has a choice. She can steal the ornament held by her predecessor or she can select a new box and open it. If she steals, then #1 opens another box from the table. This concludes round 2.

Lady #N has a similar choice. She can steal any of the ornaments currently held by Ladies 1 through N-1 or open a new box. Anyone whose ornament is stolen can steal another ornament (she cannot take back the one just taken from her) or return to the table. Round N ends when someone chooses to take a new box rather than steal.

The game continues until all of the boxes have been taken from the table. There is one special rule: if someone steals the same ornament on 3 different occasions (because it has been stolen from her in the interim) then she keeps that ornament and leaves the market (to devote her full attention to the eggnogg.)

Theoretical questions:

1. Does this mechanism produce a Pareto efficient allocation?
2. Since this is a perfect-information game (with chance moves) it can be solved by backward induction. What is the optimal strategy?
3. How can this possibly be more fun than quarters?

Pictures of Empty Plates

First in a continuing series.

Sordid Links

1. After a year without any action, boobies become more attractive.  And bluer too.
2. “Poetry’s not supposed to talk about stuff it’s supposed to talk about…”
3. Clown therapy.

Goofy Foot

When you learn to snowboard you make a commitment before you begin whether you will ride regular or “goofy.”  Goofy means you place your right foot in front.  As the name suggests, goofy footers are the minority.  Since snowboard bindings must be fixed in place for regular or goofy foot, somebody who doesn’t know whether they are goofy will more likely start out regular (because its the best guess and because most rental boards will be setup for regular foot.)  Even if they are naturally goofy, once they invested a day learning, they are unlikely to switch and try it out and so may never know.

A surfboard is foot-neutral.  Anybody can ride any given surfboard whether they are regular or goofy.  And jumping up on a surfboard for the first time happens so fast that you have no time to even think which foot is going forward.  So a surfer is very likely to find his natural footing early on, unless he learned to snowboard already in which case he will naturally jump to the footing he is used to.

We should be able to see the effect of this by comparing a regular-foot snowboarder who first learned to surf with a regular-foot surfer who first learned to snowboard.  The first guy is going to be better at snowboarding than the second guy is at surfing.

What will be the comparison for goofies?

Ethan Iverson on Paul Bley

Paul Bley is the most influential jazz pianist you have never heard of.  And its not because he is an abstract, inaccessible, musician’s musician.  His playing is as lyrical and straightforward as Keith Jarrett.   Go to Pandora and create a Paul Bley station.  Here, I did it for you.

Ethan Iverson wrote an essay on Paul Bley, focusing especially on an album entitled Footloose! (which I have never heard.  I have stuck mostly to his solo stuff.)

Not just Jarrett and Corea but a whole generation of mostly caucasian post-1970 NYC jazz pianists checked out Footloose!: Richie Beirach, Joanne Brackeen, Jim McNeely, Marc Copland, Kenny Werner, Fred Hersch, etc., all seem to have made room for Paul Bley to hang at the same table that Bill Evans presides over. Bley’s peers Steve Kuhn and Denny Zeitlin seem to have paid attention, too. I suspect that not all these comparatively straight-ahead musicians paid the same kind of attention to more hardcore classic Bley albums like the ferocious Barrage or the minimalist Ballads. But since Footloose! is so swinging, it has always been interesting to just about everybody. Indeed, I believe that Bley’s influence crossed the color line with Geri Allen in the 80s and that now he is considered a resource for any curious musician regardless of background.

The article is typically brilliant Iverson writing, but this bit was just precious:

When I finally met Paul Bley a couple of years ago, I was about to go onstage with his old associate Charlie Haden. Bley was rather chilly at first handshake. These days he’s a famous contrarian, and I sensed I needed to not grovel but respond in kind. I leaned into him and told him, viciously, “I had all your records at one point. But you know what? I can’t play like you, and why would I want to? I gave all your records away when I was 24. I turned my back.”

Bley looked astonished, but then he grinned. “I’m glad you got rid of all my records, that’s what I tell all pianists to do.”

I responded, “Yeah…good. Well, recently I got some of your records, and I decided to love you again.”

Bley said, “That was a mistake. Get rid of my records.”

Lowest Unique Bid

Auction sites are popping up all over the place with new ideas about how to attract bidders with the appearance of huge bargains.  The latest format I have discovered is the “lowest unique bid” auction.  It works like this.  A car is on the auction block.  Bidders can submit as many bids as they wish ranging from one penny possibly to some upper bound, in penny increments.  The bids are sealed until the auction is over.  The winning bid is the lowest among all unique bids.  That is, if you bid 2 cents and nobody else bids 2 cents, but more than one person bid 1 cent, then you win the car for 2 cents.

In some cases you pay for each bid but in some cases bids are free and you pay only if you win.  Here is a site with free bidding.  An iPod shuffle sold for $0.04.  Here is a site where you pay to bid.  The top item up for sale is a new house.  In that auction you pay ~$7 per bid and you are not allowed to bid more than $2,000.  A house for no more than $2,000, what a deal!

I suppose the principle here is that people are attracted by these extreme bargains and ignore the rest of the distribution.  So you want to find a format which has a high frequency of low winning bids.  On this dimesion the lowest unique bid seems even better than penny auctions.

Caubeen curl: Antonio Merlo.

Zermelo’s Theorem

After a day of conference talks, but before drinks arrive, game theorists have been known to debate whether what is known as Zermelo’s theorem was actually proved by Zermelo.  Eran Shmaya (who is always fun to talk to with or without drinks) decided to go and look at the paper (recently translated) and all but strips Zermelo of his theorem.

So, Zermelo clearly did not set out to prove his eponymous theorem. But was he aware of it ? I guess the answer depends on what you mean by being aware of a mathematical statement (were you aware of the fact that any even number greater than 2 can be written as a sum of a prime number and an even number before you read this sentence ?). But I do believe that some of the logical implications in Zermelo’s paper only make sense if you already assume his theorem.

Sniping and Squatting

Via kottke, Clusterflock gives five simple rules for effective bidding on eBay:

Step One:Find the product you want.

Step Two:

Save the product to your watch list.

Step Three:

Wait.

Step Four:

Just before the item ends, enter the maximum amount you are willing to pay for the item.

Step Five:

Click submit.

This is called sniping.  That’s a pejorative label for what is actually a sensible and perfectly straightforward way to bid.  eBay is essentially an open second-price auction and sniping is a way to submit a “sealed” bid.  It’s a popular strategy and advocated by many eBay “experts.”  But does it really pay off?

Tanjim Hossain and I did an experiment (ungated version.)  We compared sniping to another straightforward strategy we call squatting. As the name suggests, squatting means bidding your value on an object at the very first opportunity, essentially staking a claim on that object.  We bid on DVDs and randomly divided auctions into two groups, sniping on the auctions in the first group and squatting on the other.

The two strategies were almost indistinguishable in terms of their payoff.  But for an interesting reason.  A lot of eBay bidders use a strategy of incremental bidding.  That’s where you act as if you are involved in an ascending auction (like an English auction) and you bid the minimum amount needed to become the high biddder.  Once you are the high bidder you stop there and wait to see if you are outbid, then you raise your bid again.  You do this until either you win or the price goes above the maximum amount you are willing to pay.

Against incremental bidders, sniping has a benefit and a cost (relative to squatting.)  You benefit when incremental bidders stop at a price below their value.  You swoop in at the end, the incremental bidders have no time to respond, and you win at the low price.

The cost has to do with competition across auctions for similar objects.  If I squat on auction A and you are sniping in auction B, our opponents think there is one fewer competitor in auction B and more opponents enter auction B than A.  This tends to raise the price in your auction relative to mine.  In other words, squatting scares opponents away, sniping does not.

We found that these two effects almost exactly canceled each other out for auctions of DVDs.  We expect that this would be true for similar objects that are homogeneous and sold in many simultaneous auctions.  So the next time you are bidding in such an auction, don’t think too hard and just bid your value.

Now, I am still trying to figure out what I am going to do with all these copies of 50 First Dates we won in the experiment.

A Nice Exercise (or Nasty, Depending on How You Look At It)

Steven Landsburg set 10 questions for honors graduates at Oberlin College.  #8 is a great undergraduate game theory exercise:

Question 8. The five Dukes of Earl are scheduled to arrive at the royal palace on each of the first five days of May. Duke One is scheduled to arrive on the first day of May, Duke Two on the second, etc. Each Duke, upon arrival, can either kill the king or support the king. If he kills the king, he takes the king’s place, becomes the new king, and awaits the next Duke’s arrival. If he supports the king, all subsequent Dukes cancel their visits. A Duke’s first priority is to remain alive, and his second priority is to become king. Who is king on May 6?

visor volley: BoingBoing.

Taxi Negotiation Conventions Across Countries

Chris Blattman writes:

Strategy part 3: Figure out the national bargaining fraction. Anchor too low and some cabbies will simply stop talking to you. Unfortunately, that fraction is hard to predict. In Ethiopia, it seems to be about 70%. He’ll counter with 130% the target, and you get to the price you want in about two rounds. Very civilized. This, of course, is based on a sample of four. But my standard error is very low.

I especially love discovering the bargaining fraction and number of rounds in a country. Within a city it is surprisingly consistent, from taxis to markets. Cross-country variation is huge.

Based on travel this year, here is my guesstimation of starting fraction and rounds:

• Ethiopia: 0.7 with 2 rounds
• Argentina: no less than 0.9 and 1 round.
• Canada: 1 and 0
• Uganda: 0.5 and 4 rounds
• Liberia: 0.1 and 8 rounds
• Morocco: 0.001 and upwards of 754 rounds (including mint tea).

I don’t do that much exotic international travel, but I do recall in Singapore that there was no negotiation at all but still it was impossible to know what the fare was because the meter was programmed with all kinds of fixed charges, surcharges and variable mileage rates depending on time of day.  Plus major roads have tolls that are adjusted every second depending on traffic and the risk was born by the passengers.  So I would call Singapore a 1, -1.  (It was always dirt cheap in the end anyway.)

Why It Pays to be Dumb

I am a lousy mathematician.  I can’t do algebra.  My eyes glaze over when asked to follow calculations on the board.  And I have a really bad memory.  These are just a few of my keys to success.

Because I have minimal facility with technical arguments I had to learn early on how to translate them into natural language so that I could understand them.  It takes a long time.  And quite often its just impossible to do.  In those cases I have to give up.

But when it works, I come away with a unique way of explaining things that are otherwise “left to the appendix.”  It makes for good seminars.  And it makes teaching time consuming but fun.

Best of all is that enough practice with this and it begins to pay off in research.  I can’t “figure things out” with a pen and pad in front of me.  Instead I start with an intuition, explain it to myself in a natural language, and see where that goes.  Progress usually means formalizing the intuition, seeing some implications on paper, and then retranslating those back, etc. (It helps when I have the talented co-authors I work with.)

I count this liability as a virtue because a) I have to find something to say I am good at, b) being able to explain things in plain language is a valuable skill which I am forced to acquire and c) I’d like to think that it acts as a mild fiddle-filter.  If I try hard and I can’t explain it convincingly it words, I am content to say that it must not be a compelling idea. (Not to say that silly ideas don’t nevertheless sometimes slip through the filter.)

How to Get the Attention of Recalcitrant Referees

One of the least enjoyable tasks of a journal editor is to nag referees to send reports.  Many things have been tried to induce timeliness and responsiveness.  We give deadlines.  We allow referees to specify their own deadlines.  We use automated nag-mails.  We even allow referees to opt-in to automated nag-mails (they do and then still ignore them.)

When time has dragged on and a referee is not responding it is typical to send a message saying something like “please let me know if you still plan to provide a report, otherwise i will try to do without it.”  These are usually ignored.

A few years ago I tried something new and every time since then it has gotten an almost immediate response, even from referees who have ignored multiple previous nudges.  I have suggested it to other editors I know and it works for them too. I have an intuition for why it works (and that’s why I tried it in the first place) but I can’t quite articulate it, perhaps you have ideas.  Here is the clinching message:

Dear X

I would like to respond soon to the authors but it would help me a lot if I could have your report.  I realize that you are very busy, so if you think you will be able to send me a report within the next week, then please let me know.  If you don’t think you will be able to send a report, then there is no need to respond to this message.

Plog

I listen to Pandora whenever I am in my office.  It does a pretty good job of finding music that matches my taste, sometimes a really good job.  In the past few weeks I’ve found some stuff that was completely new to me that I really liked.  I created a station based on these tunes:

1. Beep! Marty’s Mishap.  I have never heard of this trio and as far as I can tell google has not either. The rhythm is an instrument if that makes any sense.  This is exactly the kind of music I like.
2. Nels Cline, Alstromeria.  I don’t know how to classify this music.  The guitar playing is virtuosity without showing off.  The composition is academic without feeling pretentious.
3. Tomasz Stanko Quartet, Kattorna.  I first learned of this quartet in a roundabout way.  The rhythm section has a few albums as a trio (The Marcin Waslez-somethingPolish-ski Trio) that I found on Pandora and really like.  Then I learned that their main gig is this quartet led by trumpeter Tomasz Stanko.  The quartet may be even better.  Listen to what the piano is doing during the trumpet solos.
4. Erik Friedlander, Quake.  He plays cello.  Lots of other people play lots of other instruments.  Sometimes all at once.  The music ranges from controlled chaos to the beautifully melodic.
5. Rolf Lislevand, Toccata. Nuove Musiche with a modern sensibility.  Beautiful.
6. Moraz & Bruford, Living Space.  Piano and drums, that’s it.  But the pianist thinks he is playing the drums and the drummer thinks he is playing the piano.

All week this will be my music to read job-market files to.  Join me.

Nailin’ The Regressions In Your Pape’s Is

Ahh, Evans Hall…  (this is old yes, but still funny.)

Ask Carole

Tongue-in-cheek relationship advice from evolutionary psychology (via Mindhacks.)

Some Darwinists might say your optimal strategy would be to pair-bond with the older male but surreptitiously allow the younger, sexy male to fertilise you. But be careful, most men consider being cuckolded the greatest of betrayals.

And how about this?

You should have your husband medically assessed. It may be that some form of genetic disorder underlies his erratic behaviour, in which case he will need counselling and support. But you will also need to inform your daughters so that, if they are carriers, they do not themselves mate with men suffering from the same condition.

Sordid Links

1. Keep left at the fork fo’ shizzle.
2. My dear sir, you are requested to discuss a paper at our conference, a deposit of US$9,000,000 has been placed in a reputable bank to reimburse your expenses.
3. Why you will soon be walking through Sienese piazzi holding an iPhone over your mouth.

Social Science

My 3rd-grade daughter had some interesting social science homework this week.  Classify each of the following statements as either a fact or an opinion. (The first two are easy warm-ups.)

1. As footwear, moccasins are better than sneakers.
2. There are Iroquois living in New York State today.
3. Many Native Americans were expert craftsmen.
4. The Native American diet was more nutritious than our own.
5. Europeans had no right to settle in North America.
6. Native Americans should be treated with great respect.

The answers are after the jump.  This is a public school. Still, be careful with your expectations about political correctness (and reverse political correctness.)

Good Looks and Success

A simple implication of sexual selection is that there should be a correlation between features that attract us sexually and characteristics that make our offspring more fit. Here is an article that studies the link between physical attraction and success in sport.

The better an American football player, the more attractive he is, concludes a team led by Justin Park at the University of Bristol, UK. Park’s team had women rate the attractiveness of National Football League (NFL) quarterbacks: all were elite players, but the best were rated as more desirable.

Meanwhile, a survey of more than a thousand New Scientist Twitter followers reveals a similar trend for professional men’s tennis players.

Neither Park nor New Scientist argue that good looks promote good play. Rather, the same genetic variations could influence both traits.

“Athletic prowess may be a sexually selected trait that signals genetic quality,” Park says. So the same genetic factors that contribute to a handsome mug may also offer a slight competitive advantage to professional athletes.

Studies like this are prone to endogeneity problems because success also feeds back on physical attraction. At the extreme, we know who Roger Federer is and that gets in the way of judging his attractiveness directly. More subtly, if you show me pictures of two anonymous athletes, the one who is more successful has probably also trained better, eaten better, been raised differently and these are all endogenous characteristics that affect attractiveness directly. Knowing that they correlate with success doesn’t tell us whether “success genes” have physically attractive manifestations.

One way to improve the study would be to look at adopted children. Show subjects pictures of the athletes’ biological parents and ask the subjects to rate the attractiveness of the parents. Then correlate the responses with the performance of the children. If these children were raised by randomly selected parents (obviously that is not exactly the case) then we would be picking up the effect of exogenous sources of physical attractiveness passed on only through the genes of the parents.

And why stop with success in sport. Physical attractiveness should be correlated with intelligence, social mobility, etc.

Blackmail

Why is blackmail illegal?  Sure it’s mean and all but what  makes it a crime?  This article raises some questions about the legal scholarship behind blackmail. (The background is the Letterman case.)

Whether or not this is how Hollywood really works, Shargel does have a point of logic. The reasoning that makes blackmail illegal–and a great many other similar business activities not illegal — is something that’s never been satisfactorily explained by legal scholars. It remains a paradox of the law. That said, Halderman and Shargel shouldn’t hold their breath until January, when a judge will rule on their motion to dismiss. Even if it makes no sense, blackmail remains a serious crime.

What about the economics of blackmail?  There is one obvious economic rationale for making blackmail a crime: rent-seeking.  Seeking out and producing incriminating evidence for the express purpose of ultimately keeping it secret is a waste of labor resources and should be discouraged.  And this idea explains an otherwise puzzling asymmetry.  That is, presumably I can legally accept payment in return for publicizing good information about you. That is tantamount to threatening not to publicize it if you don’t pay me.  Whether I threaten withold good information about you or actively publicize bad information about you I am arguably doing the same thing:  threatening to lower your reputation relative to what it would otherwise be.

The economic difference is that allowing blackmail leads to unproductive rent-seeking whereas allowing me to charge you for good publicity incentivizes productive information-gathering.

In rare cases blackmail is efficient.  If I want you to dig up the dirt on me (perhaps to keep it out of more dangerous hands) we have an incentive problem.  I can’t pay you up front because then you have no incentive to do the search.  You will come back claiming that my record is so clean that despite all your efforts you came up empty-handed.  Instead I would like to pay you ex post in return for the documents.  But once you’ve already sunk the cost of searching, I will hold you up and try to renegotiate the fee.  The information is not worth anything to you since blackmail is illegal. We would both prefer to allow you to blackmail me ex post.  That way I am effectively commited to pay you for your service and you will work hard.

You can trust me to pay you for the information but now the problem is that I can’t trust you.  You will show me only half of what you found and blackmail me to keep that a secret.  Once you have your money you will show me the other half and blackmail me again. Forseeing this I won’t pay you the first time.

Once you think of this its hard to see how blackmail works at all and why we need to even make it illegal.  The blackmailer has to somehow prove that he is not hiding any additional information.  That is probably impossible because any incriminating evidence can be copied.

Maybe the problem can be solved with a reciprocal arrangement.  You dig up some dirt on me and yourself. Then you offer me the following deal.  I pay you the hush money and you hand over the information about you.  I will pay you because in return I get a threat against you which deters you from blackmailing me again.

Financial Ecosystems

From an entertaining article in the Financial Times that develops the analogy between the interconnectedness of financial instruments and biological ecosystems.

“From an individual firm’s perspective, these strategies looked like sensible attempts to purge risk through diversification: more eggs are being placed in the basket,” says Mr Haldane. “Viewed across the system as a whole, however, it is clear now that these strategies generated the opposite result: the greater the number of eggs, the greater the fragility of the basket – and the greater the probability of bad eggs.”

That is what a mathematical ecologist would have predicted if he or she had known what was going on in the world of finance. The tropical rainforest, for example, has so many interdependent species that it is more vulnerable to an external shock than the simpler ecological diversity of savannahs and grasslands.

I wonder what prescription naturally arises from this perspective?  Total laissez-faire so that the financial system can suffer enough crashes, extinctions, and re-organizations to find a configuration that is stable for the long run?  Would we someday see Business schools sending missions out to shuttering financial institutions clamoring for intervention in the name of preserving derivative-diversity.  What is the analog of sexual reproduction and random genetic mixing?

Do Somnambulists Respond to Incentives?

This article from New Scientist asks whether sleep walkers can be held morally responsible for acts committed while unconscious.  A different question is what effect a sleepwalker exception would have on crime.  Would it encourage sleepwalkers to commit more crimes, or on the extensive margin would it encourage more to people to take up sleepwalking?

I have no personal experience, but if sleepwalkers believe they are awake, then they would not be motivated by an exemption for sleepwalkers.  Of course at any moment in time all of us may be sleepwalking and assuming we all account for that small probability, a sleepwalker exemption would encourage more crime across the board.  This could be easily compensated by a small, uniform increase in penalties.

We shold worry that non-sleepwalkers will make use of the additional defense at trial (the “jammie defense?”)

Nightcap Nod: Mindhacks.