One application of social technology to a transportation problem caught my eye today: social flights. There are two civilian air travel economies – the public and the private. Private air travel, on private jets from quasi-public air fields, is a completely different experience. For one, there is no invasive security. Delays are fewer. Service is better. The drawback is the cost. Very few people can afford a private flight. Enter the what if. What if the coordination problems among a large group of people could be reconciled? What then? Why, you’d be able to take a private jet with a number of like minded people, at a coordinated time, without delays and harassment – and probably do it for less[…]
Category: Economics
In a game called “Power Grid Factory Manager”, two to five players are challenged with running a factory for five turns. The three sources of randomness (exogenous shocks) are the starting bid order, the increase in the price of energy, and the three starting factory equipments available upon the very first turn. These three sources of randomness are enough to produce all the variety required. No dice here. No reliance on luck. Managers are given the same starting conditions, and have two resources – workers and money. Everybody is paid on the same schedule, where the input costs are subject to random fluctuations and capital must be balanced. There are very large degrees of freedom involved. The person with the[…]
There’s been a some talk about education bubbles as of late. Some of the evidence is compelling. A Frontline documentary on the quality and liability of for-profit post secondary education for instance. A general lamentation of the volume and cost of MBA’s being produced. And, many gripes about the affordability / accessibility of post secondary education in the US and Canada. When demand exceeds supply, the price for that supply rises. There’s a period of lag between demand shocks and supply responses. Frequently, suppliers either overestimate demand shocks, or, more likely, increases in supply follow a step function, which in turn eventually causes a price collapse. It’s this dance between supply and demand that generates the pseudo-random price of a[…]