Some non-healthcare reading from Wages of Wins as the NBA playoffs are upon us. Should a coach bench a starter in foul trouble? Doesn’t reducing a high-quality player’s aggregate minutes adverse affect a team and thus coaches should let players play regardless of the number of fouls they have? It turns out that the optimal [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Archive for the 'Economics – General' Category
Quotation of the Day
“When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Picture hat tip to Wages of Wins.
Read the rest of this entry »Our Monopoly Economy
Via The Atlantic: Four airlines control 69% of domestic air travel Amazon sells 27% of consumer books in the U.S.; Barnes & Noble sells 16% Walmart sells 57% of Americans’ groceries Universal Music Group controls 38% of the global market for recorded music Anheuser-Busch InBev sells 39% of beer in the U.S.; Miller-Coors sells 26% [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Shapley Value
What is the Shapley Value? The Shapley value determines the relative importance of different individuals within a cooperative game. For instance, who is more important: the owner or the workers? Without an owner supplying capital, there would be business to start. Without workers to produce goods, there would be no output to sell. Thus, [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Is the Tragedy of the Commons of Myth?
There is a well known problem in economics known as the tragedy of the commons. This problem occurs when a resource, often land, is shared among many people. Without individual property rights, individuals have an incentive to over-consume and not maintain the resource. For instance, Garrett Hardin gave an example of a case where herders, sharing a [...]
Read the rest of this entry »On the importance of Networking
Networking has been found to be very important in many aspects of life, particularly job prospects and salary. Having a larger social network may even improve on-the-job performance. Networking has even been found to be important for on-the-job performance of drug dealers. A well-known finding of research on illegal markets is that drug-dealing organisations operate [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Measuring Hospital Quality
How does one measure hospital quality? Quality occurs along multiple dimensions. Thus, to summarize overall quality, one must create a weighting scheme to compete the distinct quality measures in a single measure. In most cases, quality measures should also account for differences in patient case mix. Hospitals should not be punished with lower quality scores [...]
Read the rest of this entry »Capitalism and Russia’s Alcohol Problem
It turns out that capitalism was not the cause of Russia’s current (largely alcohol-related) mortality crisis. From an NBER working paper by Bhattacharya, Gathmann, and Miller (2012): Political and economic transition is often blamed for Russia’s 40% surge in deaths between 1990 and 1994. Highlighting that increases in mortality occurred primarily among alcohol-related causes and [...]
Read the rest of this entry »On California’s Rising Gas Prices
The episode may also serve as a reminder that the more layers of regulation we put on commerce, the less resilient is the system when something goes wrong. – Jim Hamilton For Californians (like myself) who want to know why gas prices spiked more than 50 cents in about a week, you can read a [...]
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Book Review: The Pirate Organization
Pirates don’t only troll the seas. According to a book by Durant and Vergne, they download music illegally, they clone living things, and do any number of actions typically banned by authorities. But not individuals who do illegal activities are deemed pirates by these authors. They define pirates as follows as sharing the following features: [...]
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