Moneyball and Analytics
The plot of Moneyball is fairly well known among analytics folks. It’s a relatable example of how to compete on analytics. Many statisticians love baseball. It’s a natural extension. And it’s been written to death about in the pop-analytics literature. It’s good stuff. It’s a nice case study.
John Lovett predicts that Moneyball will put analytics on the map.
It’s likely. It’s just so damn relatable.
Ideas have a long journey from conception to popularization. Nash had been known to game theorists and a sub-set of political scientists who don’t understand people, since the beginning. Most didn’t learn of it until ‘A Beautiful Mind’ came out. Moneyball is that movie.
To extend the lesson from Moneyball –
1. Everybody has the same mental model of the way the world works with respect to some phenomenon. (Experience E used to perform Task T with performance P as the outcome).
2. A dominant model dictates a dominant set of Key Performance Indicators.
3. Somebody discovers a better model and validates it through analytics.
4. Somebody effectively competes better as a result of the new model.
5. Others resist the new model (lock-in), they persist in the market until they die or are defeated.
6. New model becomes the new dominant one.
7. Return to (1) and repeat.
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I’m Christopher Berry.
I bridge the gap between marketing science and data science.