ARTICLES
-
What is the relative value of deceiving an umpire compared to other skills? Enough for a career backup to earn a starting role on a playoff team.
-
Are we just late adopters, stuck in our boring old ways while others craft new habits of news consumption that revel in the interactivity of the Internet? Or is the future of journalism a matter of copying and pasting articles into a web browser?
-
Legalized weed is putting California's drug dealers out of business, as well as its hippies.
-
Our minds did not evolve for philosophy seminars, they evolved to make decisions based on limited information. And that fact can be manipulated.
-
Two economists put real prisoners through the prisoner's dilemma. They appear to be above-average at it.
-
"If only we had known that using animal training tips on humans has a successful precedent."
-
Organizations spend staggering amounts of time and money trying to predict the future, but no time or money measuring their accuracy or improving on their ability to do it. Which is unfortunate, since they may as well be reading tea leaves.
-
People spend billions on makeup, teeth whitening strips, and hair dye to improve their physical appearance without a second thought. So why do so many people look down on plastic surgery?
-
Liberals and conservatives share news in different ways and for different reasons. As news consumption continues to migrate online, those differences could incentivize liberal bias.
-
It was a bold bet on the vanity of the human spirit, and it paid off.
-
Coffee breaks can be a means to get a lot of work done in large organizations, but this productive slacking doesn't seem as effective in startups.
-
Expressed over and over in commencement addresses, it’s a beautiful idea: make a career out of what excites you, create a new path, and devote yourself to making a positive change. But it can also serve the purpose of demarcating social and class lines.
-
Whatever the explanation, we’re living in a statistically impossible world in which every parent is right that their child is special, talented, and most of all, above-average.
-
Mark Eichenlaub's answer to the question "Do grad school students remember everything they were taught in college all the time?" is a bona fide Priceonomics recommended longread.
-
-
The fact that pricing a piece of art is so difficult seems to make the price of fine art even more important. And manipulated by the galleries that sell it.
-
New services are allowing brick and mortar stores to track and understand their customers in a way that chips away at and in some ways even trumps online retail's advantages.
-
Movie tickets and DVDs cost the same for every movie, so why doesn't Hollywood save itself a boatload of money by making shorter movies?
-
When freemium services ask customers to pay, they benefit from the endowment effect - one of many fun examples of how we all fail to live up to the perfectly rational expectations economists set for us.
-
Why do so many reasonably well-off Americans choose to work for below minimum wage?
-
This is the story of India's Joint Entrance Examination, the yearly attempt to pick out the ten thousand most intelligent students in a country of 1.2 billion people.
-
How should we understand the robust findings that suggest that the price of wine is not only uncorrelated with how much people enjoy it, but that the different tastes we describe in wine may all be in our heads?
-
-
If you're just interested in getting the best food for your money, it helps to think about the economics of the restaurant biz from the owners' perspective.
-
