Knowing and Making

My company Inon, which applies behavioural economics to help our clients set the right pricing strategy, has been nominated for the Smarta 100 - the top innovative businesses in London. If we win, our £10,000 prize will be donated to charity - please leave a comment if you would like to nominate your preferred charity as one of the recipients. If you'd like to support us and your chosen charity, please click here and vote for us . You'll need to register but it only takes a few seconds. Thanks for your support - we have reached 20th in the rankings and it seems like we might have a chance if you can help spread the word.

I may have more to say about this in the next few weeks, but this New York Times article about industrial policy reminds me of a question I asked on twitter the other day: ...hedge funds and venture capitalists are geared toward investing in financial instruments and software companies. In such endeavors, even modest investments can yield extraordinarily quick and large returns. Financing brick-and-mortar factories, by contrast, is expensive and painstaking and offers far less potential for speedy returns. This might not just be a change in investors' preferences. (Although if they have decided they prefer fast returns over slow ones, I don't know that I'd criticise them for that.) What if something deeper has happened. In the late 1940s and early 50s, macroeconomic trends were fairly clear: Europe was on the verge of a major recovery, and American growth was likely to continue. In conjunction with this, we could predict with some confidence what people would want to ...

It's the one simplest thing President Obama could do to seize control of the economic agenda. It's counterintuitive - but done right, it could be the tonic both for the economy and for a divided political scene. Don't click on your back button yet - I haven't gone crazy. Obama should propose a Balanced Budget Amendment with the following key features: The balance must be achieved over ten years, not one It should include   automatic (not discretionary) investment programmes when unemployment is high, which are scaled down when the economy is doing well It should commit to share the proceeds of future growth between deficit reduction/debt repayment, tax cuts and investment This policy would provide countercyclical intervention - exactly as a responsible government should. Right now, the US economy could use five to ten million more jobs (that's about $500 billion a year, by the way). Five years ago it didn't need anything like that - there was plenty of ...

I've been listening to NPR's Planet Money podcast, and one of the recent episodes  [mp3 link] is about how much it costs to make - and promote - a hit single. Or more accurately: to attempt to make a hit single. A friend in the music industry asked me to write down their figures with so he doesn't have to listen to the whole podcast. So here they are. The record in question is Rihanna's "Man Down", which her record company Def Jam was hoping would be one of the anthems of the summer. The costs break down like this: Initial demos made at a "writing camp": $18,000 (it costs around $200,000 to hire 10 studios for a couple of weeks and make 50-100 demos for Rihanna to choose between; this cost is apportioned over the 11 tracks on the album) Fee to lyricist: $15,000 Fee to producer/composer: $20,000 Fee to vocal coach/producer: $10-15,000 Cost of other studios and recording costs: $10,000 Total production cost: around $78,000 And then the marke...

It seems that some people from outside behavioural economics are, like me, getting frustrated with the lack of progress within the field. Eric Falkenstein says here : I read Kahneman, Tversky and Slovic's Judgement under Uncertainty in the 80's (published 1982), which mainly discussed a series of papers published in the 1970s, and found it fascinating, but now it's now 30 year old stuff and pretty boring. There's a couple hundred academically based confirmed biases which are all kinda true, but not very profound This part of the posting is quite right. A commenter at the bottom sums up the problem with state-of-the-art behavioural "economics": Behavioral economics is not economics but psychology. It focuses on individuals instead of exchanges and markets. Economics makes assumptions about actors to make market predictions. BE makes predictions of actor choices just like psychologists. The question BE must address is how do biases create market conditions. ...

Here are my unedited notes from David Miles' talk on monetary policy and banking fragility tonight. This may not be of much sense or interest to everyone, so feel free to skip it if you're not into this topic. [ Here is the somewhat more coherent post I wrote before the talk] Miles – recently wrote a paper about the benefits (and costs) of higher bank capital. LSE is intellectual home of MPC in many ways. Links between monetary policy and financial stability: strong and significant Compared to pre-recession trend in 2007, this recession is almost as bad as 1929, and on current projections will be WORSE from 2012 onwards. Changes in banking sector since previous eras – more gross debt (now being reduced), more fiscal compensation (mostly automatic stabilisers), much higher bank leverage. There would have had to be a rebalancing of some kind, but the rebalancing is now happening in the context of a financial crisis. One challenge: policy compensations for imbalances (VA...