RSS Parrot

Should Robots Be Obedient?

https://theoryclass.wordpress.com/2024/08/11/should-robots-be-obedient/

Published: August 11, 2024 13:49

It is the title of a paper by Milli, Hadfield-Menell, Dragan and Russell which can be found here. Their goal is to demonstrate that when a human is not perfectly rational and delegates decision making to a robot, a selectively disobedient robot may benefit…

How To Confuse Aspiring Economist

https://theoryclass.wordpress.com/2024/08/04/how-to-confuse-aspiring-economists/

Published: August 4, 2024 12:51

The Wall Street Journal recently published an article by Steven Landsburg lamenting the disappearance of `price theory’ from the Economics curriculum. Price theory is what some Economists at the University of Chicago call their version of microeconomics.…

Algorithmic Collusion

https://theoryclass.wordpress.com/2024/05/01/algorithmic-collusion/

Published: May 1, 2024 18:39

There is now a widespread concern that the algorithms deployed to set prices, may `learn’ to collude and set prices above what one might consider to be the competitive level. Indeed, the FTC recently filed a brief against Yardi systems arguing such a…

Algorithmic Homogenization

https://theoryclass.wordpress.com/2024/02/05/algorithmic-homogenization/

Published: February 5, 2024 21:05

At a recent Algorithmic Fairness meeting, there was some discussion of algorithmic homogenization. The concern, as expressed, for example in Kleinberg and Raghavan (2021) is that “the quality of decisions may decrease when multiple firms use the same…

Sydney N. Afriat, 1925-2021

https://theoryclass.wordpress.com/2024/01/25/sydney-n-afriat-1925-2021/

Published: January 25, 2024 19:19

Sydney Afriat passed away on December 31, 2021. I learnt this in the course of a hunt for one of his papers (more on this later). Unsurprising given his vintage, but disconcerting that I could recall no notice or announcement of this event. Not even…

Robust Contracting & Linear Programming

https://theoryclass.wordpress.com/2023/12/01/robust-contracting-linear-programming/

Published: December 2, 2023 00:08

Recently Ashwin Kambhampati, Juuso Toikka and myself were engaged on a project that grew out of Carroll’s robust contracting paper . A byproduct is a new proof of Carroll’s main result which is reproduced here. It shows how his main result is a consequence…

Updating Polya on Style

https://theoryclass.wordpress.com/2023/09/23/updating-polya-on-style/

Published: September 23, 2023 14:19

From time to time, I return to Polya’s `How to Solve It‘ for advice to give my students. In spite of the passage of time it remains as trenchant and as useful as ever. One thing, however, I would amend (not emend); his second of three rules of style: The…

L’Affaire Gino

https://theoryclass.wordpress.com/2023/07/01/laffaire-gino/

Published: July 1, 2023 18:54

Like Tilman Borgers I believe that all behavioral economics and social psychology books should be housed in the self-help section of the bookstore. Indeed, Tilman tells me, that when bookstores existed he made it a point to move such books out of the…

The Irrelevance of Automated Bidding

https://theoryclass.wordpress.com/2023/04/15/the-irrelevance-of-automated-bidding/

Published: April 15, 2023 15:01

Around the mid 2010’s Google introduced automated bidding. Other platforms have followed suit. Rather than bidding directly for an `eyeball’, an advertiser delegates the bidding to the platform. In order to inform the bids that the platform will submit on…

What I Learnt from Chat GPT

https://theoryclass.wordpress.com/2023/04/06/what-i-learnt-from-chat-gpt/

Published: April 6, 2023 12:23

While my colleagues have been using Chat GPT to determine what it knows about important things, such as sunk costs and elasticity of demand, I was curious to learn what it knew about me. Here is a snippet: “He is currently a Professor of Economics at the…