Strategic Ambiguity
Yesterday just before the start of a seminar I went to the thermostat to try to warm up the room. The speaker saw me fiddling with it and nodded with approval. I said nothing, turned up the heat and...
View ArticleHealth Insurance And Flood Insurance
This paper by Finkelstein, Hendren, and Shepard finds that the uninsured have such a low willingness to pay for health insurance that they wouldn’t even cover the costs they impose on insurers: But for...
View ArticleThe Long Game
Watch for the key leading indicator of impending Presidential downfall: the Vice President going silent. We will reach a point where the VP’s objective switches from defending the President to...
View ArticleComey and Other Skeletons
The anticlimax that is/will be the Comey testimony proves something I have always thought about skeletons in the closet. They should be released early when not everyone is paying attention. The premise...
View ArticleThoughts Left Lying Around
One reason time seems to go faster when you are older. “Has it already been a year?” You have so many more things going on and only a few of them can reside in working memory. When some milestone...
View ArticleModel Up
Everyone who has armchair-theorized why movie theaters don’t sell assigned seats in advance is now obligated to explain why this has changed and how that’s consistent with their model. I will start....
View ArticleHow Junior Got Played
On Saturday The New York Times published the story that Donald Trump Jr together with Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner met in Trump Tower with a Russian Lawyer. That was basically the entire content of...
View ArticleThe Marathon Game
A one player extensive-form game with perfect information. The player’s name is Zeno. The game has an infinite horizon. For every non-negative integer N there is a node at which Zeno chooses either...
View ArticleThe Skinny
You are in a negotiation and you are offered X. You really want both X and Y but you have just been given the option to take X now and then continue negotiating for Y. In this story you are the House...
View ArticleThat Rizzo Bloop
In the bottom of the 8th inning of tonight’s game 3 of the NLDS, Anthony Rizzo blooped a single to shallow left and Leonys Martin scored what proved to be the winning run. The noteworthy thing is that...
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