Results for “model this” 3186 found
The costs of measuring value too precisely (model this)
…the editors at The Verge have a policy that seems a little bit odd and anachronistic: They don’t let writers see how much traffic their stories generate. Ever.
As the American Journalism Review reported, in a piece called “No Analytics for You: Why The Verge Declines To Share Detailed Metrics With Reporters,” the editors at The Verge simply don’t want their writers thinking about traffic.
What’s more, The Verge is not alone in this practice. Re/code, a tech site run by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, the longtime Wall Street Journal tech columnist, also won’t share traffic stats with writers. MIT Technology Review holds numbers back too.
“We used to show the writers and editors traffic, and told them to grow it; but it had the wrong effect. So we stopped,“ says Jason Pontin, CEO, editor in chief and publisher of MIT Technology Review. ”The unintended consequence of showing them traffic, and encouraging them to work to grow total audience, is that they became traffic whores. Whereas I really wanted them to focus on insight, storytelling, and scoops: quality.”
That phrase – “traffic whore” – tells you everything you need to know about why some journalists have an aversion to chasing traffic. They fear it creates an incentive to do the wrong things.
Of course these policies hold only at some margins I believe…nor are they used at Gawker.
The full article, by Dan Lyons, is here.
Facts about hotel mini-bars (model this)
What’s surprisingly affordable in hotel rooms across the globe is, however, vodka. It’s much cheaper than peanuts and, in some cases, even water.
That is the case for instance in Zurich, Helsinki, and Oslo. (Where is the profitable cross-subsidy? Or is this price discrimination? Is vodka less likely to be claimed for reimbursement from third-party payment?) In Toronto hotel minibars, a can of nuts costs on average $18.23, at least among the hotels sampled.
That is all from Annalisa Merelli, via David Wessel.
How Medicare influences private payment systems (model this)
There is a new paper by Jeffrey Clemens and Joshua D. Gottlieb on this topic, the abstract is here:
We analyze Medicare’s influence on private payments for physicians’ services. Using a large administrative change in payments for surgical procedures relative to other medical services, we find that private payments follow Medicare’s lead. On average, a $1 change in Medicare’s relative payments results in a $1.30 change in private payments. We find that Medicare similarly moves the level of private payments when it alters fees across the board. Medicare thus strongly influences both relative valuations and aggregate expenditures on physicians’ services. We show further that Medicare’s price transmission is strongest in markets with large numbers of physicians and low provider consolidation. Transaction and bargaining costs may lead the development of payment systems to suffer from a classic coordination problem. By extension, improvements in Medicare’s payment models may have the qualities of public goods.
This paper, which seems quite sound to me, has a few implications.
First, if you are unhappy with the American health care system, government is more at fault for the problems of the private sector than it may at first appear. We have a much more governmental system than most of its critics care to admit and that goes even beyond government health care spending as a percentage of total health care spending.
Second, we could cut Medicare reimbursement rates, by limiting the doc fix, without old people all very rapidly going to the back of the health care queue.
Third, the authors find that the larger Medicare becomes, the stronger this “pass through” effect generally will be. In other words, this result will be all the more true in our future.
Fourth, the cross-sectoral price transmission result implies that long-run supply elasticities in the sector are not large, which also does not bode well for the future of health care access in an aging society.
Overall this is a depressing paper, although it implies that successful Medicare cost control could have significant cross-sectoral benefits, beyond Medicare itself.
Model this taper and show your work, if only verbally
Shortly following the announcement of a delayed taper:
The rupee rallied 2.8 percent to 63.4950 per dollar, according to prices from local banks compiled by Bloomberg. Thailand’s baht rose 1.2 percent to 31.850, the Philippine peso gained 1.4 percent to 43.87 and Malaysia’s ringgit appreciated 1.2 percent to 3.29. Global funds pumped $5.7 billion into the stock markets of India, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand this week, according to exchange data.
Pay special heed to quantitative magnitudes. For how long are we delaying the taper? One or two months? How much is the taper anyway, relative to the stock of relevant financial assets? Taking $10 to $15 billion off of $85 billion a month in purchases, when the asset stocks are in the trillions? Woo hoo.
Here are some interesting comments from Stephen Jen.
I’ll say it again: none of you understand what is going on here, and neither do I. I am not seeing enough admission of this basic fact.
Addendum: Scott Sumner offers a response.
Sentences to ponder (model this)
Our main result is that an increase in per-capita Muslim expenditures generates a large and significant increase in future religious conflict. An increase in Hindu expenditures has negative or no effect.
Here is more, from Mitra and Ray. The pointer is from Andres Marroquin.
Why is there still inflation in Greece? (model this)
The rates of price inflation in Greece have been running in the range of 0.8% to 2%.
For another point of view, try this article:
The new bank that emerged from the breakup of Greece’s troubled Hellenic Postbank will initially hire all of the old lender’s staff but offer voluntary redundancies as it tries to cut payroll costs by 30 percent, its management said on Saturday.
The latter story of course is not just specific to a single firm but is common from Greece over the last few years.
It’s funny how many people pretend to understand what is going on here. If Greece were seeing a stronger bout of price deflation, the situation would be much clearer. How can you try to explain these disparate facts?
1. The true rate of inflation is much lower — in fact there is deflation — because of reporting biases in the Greek CPI. That’s putting a lot of faith in numbers we do not see, plus it does not explain why the recorded numbers still show some upward pressure.
2. For structural adjustment reasons Greece needs a big cut in real wages, but AD is holding up OK. It’s hard for me to believe the last part of that one.
3. You can have a major and sustained whack to AD, but still have rising prices. How so? Would Lieutenant Colombo be happy with this?
4. Scott Sumner has a view which I do not understand, and thus do not wish to try to state, but it has something to do with not really believing in the concept of price inflation.
5. Prices are sticky, AD is falling, and almost all of the adjustment is in quantities. Yet this still doesn’t explain why prices are inching up, and furthermore it is grossly at variance with the actual empirical literature on price stickiness (much neglected in the blogosphere I should add), which is not nearly as strong as wage stickiness.
6. There are multiple equilibria, and Greece is moving from a perception of having “nearly West European levels of trust and cooperation” to having “Balkan levels of trust and cooperation,” and that is causing real wages and investment to plummet. I’ve toyed with this hypothesis in the past, but I would be the first to admit it is highly speculative. I do still think it is part of the explanation.
There is a similar puzzle for some of the other eurozone economies, and even, to a much smaller degree, for the United States over the last few years.
Why would you write a bum check to God? (model this)
Maybe you are hoping that God will make the check a good one? From the Western Wall in Jerusalem:
Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch, who oversees Jerusalem’s Western Wall, said a worshipper found an envelope at the site Wednesday with 507 checks in the amount of about $1 million each. They were not addressed to anyone, and it’s doubtful they can be cashed.
Rabinovitch said most are Nigerian. Israeli police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said some were from the United States, Europe and Asia.
The story is here and for the pointer I thank Mark Thorson.
Why do older players commit more technical fouls in basketball? (model this)
Surprisingly, the average player gets whistled for more technicals each season they are in the league, according to Stats LLC. For instance, rookies average less than one technical. That number grows to an average of two technical fouls by the third year of a player’s career, and to more than three technicals by the fifth. Players average closer to four technicals per season upon reaching their 12th year.
Why the additional whistles? A primary reason: Players get ruder as they get older.
“Guys will call you ‘Mister’ early in their career, then they develop a comfort level to where it becomes a first-name basis,” said retired official Steve Javie, now an ESPN analyst. “They’re more comfortable talking to you, and sometimes that leads them to express their emotions a bit too much at times.”
The technical-foul disparity is most pronounced for players who enter the league as high draft picks.
Here is more. What are the other implied predictions of this model? And this is interesting too:
While players get more technicals the longer they stay in the league, coaches do the opposite. The average NBA coach picks up six technicals a season his first six years on the job before mellowing out. Those who coach 13 years or more average fewer than four techincals per season.
The myth of the rational donor? (model this)
At first glance this may sound a little whacky, but perhaps the deeper question is why more donors are not like this?:
“I’m all mixed up between being a conservative and a liberal,” said Kurt Schoeneman, a grape grower from Northern California, who added that some of his friends thought he was “senile.” He had found himself seized by waves of enthusiasm, Mr. Schoeneman said — first for one candidate and then for the other.
“Some of these people, they just loathe Obama, and they’ll write something really nasty about him,” said Mr. Schoeneman, who has given checks to both candidates, most recently $100 to Mr. Romney in June and $100 to Mr. Obama in July. “And then something else will happen, and I’ll go give Romney some money.”
Charles Y. Chen, a salesman in Virginia, gave Mr. Romney $100 on the day of his convention speech in late August. But in September, Mr. Chen donated to Mr. Obama every few days, $50 here, $55 there. Then he switched again, giving Mr. Romney $50.
“I think the Republicans have better ideas on the economy and the Democrats have better ideas on social issues, immigrationand social justice,” Mr. Chen said in an interview. “Just like anything, both have something that they do great and something that they need to improve.”
Gretchen Davidson, a homemaker in Birmingham, a Detroit suburb, said she had gone to several events to hear different ideas and arguments. She gave $500 to Mr. Romney in early August and $1,500 to Mr. Obama in late September.
“You have friends that throw parties on each side, and honestly, I am someone in the middle that didn’t really know which way I was going,” Ms. Davidson said. “You try to sort of see what people are so excited about.”
These are not lobbyists who need to hedge their giving:
Mr. Bagchi gave $100 each to both candidates on Sept. 8, he said, because “they are doing good work for the country. And I want them to come together. So for that reason, I gave to them both.”
Mr. Bagchi said that while he usually gave equally to both candidates, he had recently responded to a particularly personal appeal from the Obama campaign.
“I have given a little more to Barack Obama because he and Michelle were celebrating their anniversary,” he said. “But on balance it was very equal.”
MOOC cheating (model this)
From an email from Coursera:
Several students have contacted me about cases of cheating on the Final Exam. Frankly, why anyone who do this in a course that focuses on learning and offers no credentials, beats me. Students who cheat are really cheating themselves. If you are sure an answer is plagiarized from somewhere else (often easy to determine with a quick web search), you could simply award 1’s everywhere, which amounts to a score of 0. Whether you do that for one question or the whole exam is up to you. If there is any doubt that the student has broken the honor code, you have to give the student the benefit of that doubt. 0 on the whole exam is more significant than on one question. Though again, the stakes here are essentially zero; it’s mostly about self esteem, surely. For truly egregious cases, send me the details (your login id and the Student number (1, 2, or 3) and I can take it from there. Violation of the honor code is cause for expulsion from the class. Expulsion has occurred, in this class and others, I’m sad to say.
Meanwhile, if you want to know how evaluation training and peer grading looked from our side (the instruction team and the folks at Coursera who were making sure the ship stayed afloat), check out my latest post at MOOCtalk.org to see what was going on behind the scenes. Enjoy! 🙂
I thank AA for the pointer.
Model this (the Goldman guy)
Everyone is talking about the Goldman guy who quit, he wrote this (reactions here):
I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival. It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.
Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm. And get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons.
This strikes me as economically naive. Is it at least possible that the culture at Goldman has changed (I am not myself committing to any assessment here of GS) because profit maximization dictates such a shift? What are a few possible models?
1. Income from trading has risen in importance, relative to income from clients, and if you can do well trading you will make money, whether or not you are a jerk.
2. Greater competitiveness lowers levels of service quality for efficiency wage-like reasons. GS can no longer play the role of high mark-up, precommit to high-quality, monopolist.
3. We have moved to the “used car” equilibrium. You know they are screwing you over, or trying to, but leaving for the guy next door simply replicates the same basic incentives so you stay put and fight back best you can.
4. The current interest rate spread means they don’t have to try too hard.
Anything else? Those are possible mechanisms, not factual claims about the world. In any case, I am suspicious of his impulse to blame it all on a sudden shift in the moral propensities of the people he was working with.
Model this
Students in George Parrott’s psychology courses have an unusual requirement: they must bring homemade snacks each week to the laboratory section, and they need to work out a schedule such that groups of students make sure each session is covered, and that snacks aren’t repeated from week to week. If there are no snacks, Parrott walks out of his class at California State University at Sacramento, and the students lose that week’s instruction.
Parrott has been teaching at the university since 1969. He says he started this requirement a few years after he arrived — and that most students have appreciated the ideas behind the rule (which he says are more educational than culinary). But on Thursday, when students in the morning section of Foundations of Behavioral Research didn’t bring muffins (or anything), he enforced his rule. He left class and took his teaching assistant to breakfast. One of the other sections missed its snack obligation one day last month, and he left that class, too. Ever since, the snack schedule has been followed by the students in that class.
I snickered at this sentence:
This is Parrott’s last semester before retirement, but his teaching technique — in use for more than 30 years — is now being subjected to scrutiny.
Here is more.
I never understood gambling in the first place (model this)
Why hire someone to do your gambling for you? This report is from Singapore:
A hard day’s work for Bangladeshi construction worker Salim used to mean toiling under the burning sun. But nowadays, at least once a week, he finds himself assigned to a very different kind of ‘job’ – playing the jackpot machines in the cool air-conditioned comfort of Resorts World Sentosa.
The 29-year-old is one of a number of foreign employees being sent to the casino to gamble on behalf of their employers to feed their own habit, a Straits Times investigation has found.
Five bosses – some with exclusion orders against them – told The Straits Times that they have been handing workers cash, notebooks and mobile phones, then dispatching them to the casino. They claimed to know several other employers doing the same thing.
The ‘proxy gamblers’, dressed mostly in company polo T-shirts and jeans, get a cut of the winnings, but if they lose too much, their pay is docked.
The link is here (part of the article is gated), and for the pointer I thank Daniel Riveong.
Model this (a continuing series)
From a profile of Donald Keene:
“He [Mishima] died, as you know, at the age of 45, leaving at least 45 stacked volumes of novels, plays, criticism, poetry.” Mishima slit his belly after leading a failed, and farcical, coup to restore the emperor’s power but Keene thinks he committed suicide because he was passed over for the Nobel Prize. During the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Mishima had written Keene a letter with the line, “I envy the athletes who know if they are first, second or third.” Keene says: “That was all he said but I knew exactly what he meant.” The irony was that Kawabata, who did win the Nobel Prize, also committed suicide because of the pressure of living up to his new reputation.
Model this
As we have written before, private colleges and universities are by far the biggest offenders on grade inflation, even when you compare private schools to equally selective public schools.
There are charts and further information at the link. By the way:
…about 43 percent of all letter grades given were A’s, an increase of 28 percentage points since 1960 and 12 percentage points since 1988. The distribution of B’s has stayed relatively constant; the growing share of A’s instead comes at the expense of a shrinking share of C’s, D’s and F’s. In fact, only about 10 percent of grades awarded are D’s and F’s.
It’s worth trying to model that too.