That is the title of my Mercatus working paper (PDF), released yesterday. Basically, it aims to be a short course in public economics for tech policy analysts. Almost all policy wonks have taken Econ 101, perhaps even a graduate version, in which they learn that externalities can cause markets to get prices wrong, and that [...]
Tags: Buchanan, Coase, cybersecurity, internet governance, market failure, Mercatus, Ostrom, public economics, Stubblebine
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Karl Smith playfully suggests that it is ironic that Steve Jobs has so many fans among Austrian economists: Apple was principally the complete opposite of the decentralized local-knowledge driven catallaxy that Austrian’s trumpet. It was a highly centralized, tightly controlled integrated company that managed every step of the process from design to retailing. …Apple seemed [...]
Tags: Alchian, Apple, central planning, Coase, Hayek, Jobs, Smith, The Meaning of Competition, The Nature of the Firm, The Use of Knowledge in Society, Uncertainty Evolution and Economic Theory
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Twitter spam is a frequent occurrence, and I typically ignore it, but not today. This morning I received this message from an account that has been spamming people for several days. I did my duty and reported the account for spam and…nothing. I did a little research and discovered that the director of Twitter’s Trust [...]
Tags: Coase, Harvey, public goods, spam, Stone, The Lighthouse in Economics, Twitter, Williams
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If you follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed last week that I have an app in the new Mac App Store. It’s called Gmail Dock, you can find more info about it here and here, and you can buy it here. I am an economist, not a programmer, so what am I doing [...]
Tags: App Store, Apple, Coase, economics, Gmail Dock, Mac App Store, Nature of the Firm, transaction costs
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This Black Friday, I had the occasion to ponder why it is that Apple offers free engraving on iPods and iPads (hereafter, iP*ds). A small part of the reason is surely that it adds value for some of its customers. But assuming that the cost of engraving is not zero, this is not much of [...]
Tags: Apple, Bulow, Coase, durable goods problem, engraving, iPad, iPod, secondary market
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I am told that there will be an election next week. Actually nobody told me; it’s what I gathered from the yard signs. Elections, for me, are a spectator sport. I will probably be up all night watching the Prop 19 returns come in, but I haven’t participated since Bryan Caplan showed me the mathematics [...]
Tags: Caplan, Coase, democracy, elections, political economy
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Welcome to the third installment in our series of discussions of the Most Insightful Articles in economics. Today we are discussing Ken Arrows’s 1950 article A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare. If you’re interested in politics, you may have done the following thought experiment. Suppose there are three voters—1, 2, and 3—and three [...]
Tags: Arrow, Coase, Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare, economics, impossibility theorem, Levine, Most Insightful Articles, Plott, Problem of Social Cost
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Welcome to the first installment of our series of discussions of the Most Insightful Articles in economics. Today we are discussing Ronald Coase’s 1937 article The Nature of the Firm. Ronald Coase wrote only a handful of academic journal articles—nearly every one is a blockbuster. He won the Nobel Prize in 1991 “for his discovery [...]
Tags: Coase, economics, Hayek, Most Insightful Articles, Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Use of Knowledge in Society
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Which economics articles teach us the most about how to think about the world? Over the next few weeks, I plan to write about the articles that I think belong in this group. I am hoping that some readers will want to follow along and discuss the articles in the comments. Here is what I [...]
Tags: Coase, economics, Most Insightful Articles, Nature of the Firm
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