Happy Sunday! Today, I’m stepping away from the antitrust series to explore a lighter topic: deadlines–—the last-minute scrambles that somehow keep our world spinning. Somehow I noticed that people like to procrastinate until the very last minute–sometimes the action seems plausible while some doesn’t. Here’s some observation. Join me as we unpack the economics behind the ticking clock in our daily lives. deadline: a love-hate relationship Ever noticed how our daily tasks are relentlessly deadline-driven? Whether it’s the takeout guy racing against the clock to deliver your food hot, or that looming 11:59 PM deadline for your assignments, the ending time point is of the essence. Like a train that wait for no one, departing at 8 AM sharp—almost as if the universe itself is in on this conspiracy against procrastination. ...

Are You Caught in a Social Media Trap? Stephen J. Dubner. Mar 6, 2024, Freakonomics. In this episode, Stephen Dubner interviewed Ben HANDEL and Leonardo BURSZTYN about their new paper: When Product Markets Become Collective Traps: The Case of Social Media. Leonardo Bursztyn, Benjamin R. Handel, Rafael Jimenez & Christopher Roth. 2023. ABSTRACT Individuals might experience negative utility from not consuming a popular product. For example, being inactive on social media can lead to social exclusion or not owning luxury brands can be associated with having a low social status. We show that, in the presence of such spillovers to non-users, standard measures that take aggregate consumption as given fail to appropriately capture welfare. We propose a new methodology to measure welfare that accounts for these consumption spillovers, which we apply to estimate the consumer surplus of two popular social media platforms, TikTok and Instagram. In large-scale, incentivized experiments with college students, we show that, while the standard welfare measure suggests a large and positive surplus, our measure accounting for consumption spillovers indicates a negative surplus, with a large share of active users deriving negative utility. We also shed light on the drivers of consumption spillovers to non-users in the case of social media and show that, in this setting, the “fear of missing out” plays an important role. Our framework and estimates highlight the possibility of product market traps, where large shares of consumers are trapped in an inefficient equilibrium and would prefer the product not to exist. ...

Antitrust and Big Tech, and Is Corporate Lobbying A Good or Bad Thing? SEASON 1 –– EPISODE 13 MAY 17, 2018, After Hours. Here’s the gem–in a previous episode of “HBS After Hours,” the conversation delved into the increasingly contentious realm of antitrust, particularly as it pertains to the titans of technology. The hosts, Youngme Moon, Mihir Desai, and Felix Oberholzer-Gee, unpacked the implications of large corporations’ market behaviors and the (possibly waning) effectiveness of antitrust as a regulatory mechanism. ...

ECONOMICS OF REGULATION AND ANTITRUST by W. Viscusi, Joseph Harrington Jr. and David Sappington Chapter 3 Introduction of Antitrust | Reading Write-Ups Introduction: The Value of Studying Antitrust The essence of economics vibrates with the spirit of competition. While not utterly unconstrained—no, firms can’t simply dynamite their competitors’ facilities—we lean on competition as the quintessential engine driving favorable economic outcomes. But sometimes competition evaporates. Essentially, antitrust laws strive to enhance market functionality by nurturing and regulating competition. ...

TA Notes | Problem solving session for Advanced Operational Research, taught at SUFE 2024 Spring/Summer semester. Inspiration taken from EE364a I took 2023 Summer at Stanford. There are basically three ways to establish convexity of a function $f$: verify definition (rarely used) if $f$ is twice-differentiable, show $\nabla^2f(x) \succeq 0 $​ NOTE: only recommended for simple enough functions. a function is simple enough iff. it’s ‘manual-computationally tractable’ for you show that $f$​ is obtained from simple convex functions by operations that preserve convexity ...

The original Chinese version of Nocturnal Narratives: 《选妃》 不敢说博学，但我蛮喜欢读书的：因为晚上做题， 解题目到了兴头上容易失眠，床头就得常放着一两本书，睡前翻两页，也就有困意了。 选书也有技巧。太有趣不行。之前从书店买了套阿西莫夫的小说集，好几本。读到《神们自己》， 以为还是短篇集，每一晚上读几篇，可多可少，困了就睡。结果这本是中长篇，写的还不错，忍不住一口气看完，天就快亮了。 太硬也不行。有一次选了范里安的《微观经济学现代观点》，实在是太抽象。索性躺在床上发呆，又想起来刚刚没解出来的题，更睡不着了。 内容还有讲究。蔡澜的散文和杂文很合适，但他的美食评论是坚决不能睡前看的，写的太好。 最后，也会强迫自己多少读读哲学和心理学的书， 我不喜欢，但经不住朋友喜欢，还乐意借给我。不过这些书最催眠，也就爱屋及乌了。 住在宿舍不比家中舒适。但每天挑书陪睡，像翻牌子。常告诚自己少专宠，要雨露均沾，要节制，不要在新欢旧爱之间觉得力不从心一一要早点睡。

As midnight descends and my dorm dims to whispers, my overactive neurons find solace from bedside books–nestled between the sheets and a stack of eclectic reads, here’s how the allure of knowledge brings sweet lure of slumber. Excerpts (translated) from my scholarship personal story nocturnal narratives | whispers from my nightstand shelf I wouldn’t claim to be a polymath, but I’m quite fond of reading: mainly because solving problems at night gets my brain too wired to sleep. Hence, I always keep a couple of books at my bedside, flipping through a few pages before sleep beckons. ...

Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) stands as Argentina’s most celebrated musical innovator, the man who single-handedly transformed the tango into a global phenomenon. Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992) is Argentina’s most famous musical name—the man who has almost single-handedly brought the passion, thrill and beauty of the tango to a worldwide audience. Would the composer and bandoneon player have been able to achieve this without years of studying in Paris with the great Nadia Boulanger? ...

Plants vs. Zombies (2009), crafted by PopCap, is more than just a game. Sure, I could wax technical about how it’s essentially a finite Markov Decision Process (MDP) with a tightly defined set of actions and stochastic outcomes. But really, it’s about strategic greenery and quirky zombies invading your lawn in an oddly delightful dance of sunlight and survival. If I frame it as an MDP, I might sound nerdy… Just kidding, the game is a blast. ...

Ever stumbled upon a track that plays like a secret everyone knows but no one talks about? Well, Ariana Grande’s unreleased single “Communicate” fits that bill perfectly. It’s an intriguing piece about the dance of words and silences that happens right before a relationship officially starts. And here’s the kicker—it’s somehow popped up officially on platforms like Apple Music and Spotify, but not under Ariana’s name. Instead, it’s credited to “Who Do We Blame.” Curious, isn’t it? ...