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Cracking the Code: Addressing Some of the Challenges in Research Software

Macro Concerns 1. Lack of Incentives for Producing High-Quality Software. Software’s role in enabling and accelerating research cannot be overstated. But the incentives for producing software in academia are still very thin. One reason is that people do not cite the software they use; the academic currency is still

When Is Discrimination Profit-Maximizing?

Consider the following scenario: There are multiple firms looking to fill identical jobs. And there are multiple eligible workers given each job opening. Both the company and the workers have perfect information, which they are able toacquire without cost. Assume also that employees can switch jobs without cost. Under these

Generative AI and the Market for Creators

Many widely used machine-learning models rely on copyrighted data. For instance, Google finds the most relevant web pages for a search term by relying on a machine learning model trained on copyrighted web data. But the use of copyrighted data by machine learning models that generate content (or give answers

Hidden Code: Why Do Companies Open Source Code and Publish Papers?

Hardly a day passes without a major company announcing the release of a new scientific paper or code around a powerful technique. But why do so many companies open source (via papers and code) so many impactful technologies almost as soon as they are invented? The traditional answers—to attract

Tipping Lemons: Market Failures in Tips

Say that people can be easily identified by characteristic C. Say that the average tip left by people of group C_A is smaller than !C_A with a wide variance in tipped amounts within each group. Let’s assume that the quality of service (two levels: high or low)

Bad Service: Missing Functionality in Web Services

A host of cloud services are missing the core functionality needed to build businesses on top of the services. Powerful services on mature platforms like Google Vision, etc., have a common set of deficiencies—they do not allow clients to send information about preferred latency and throughput (for a price)

Reducing Friction in Selling Data Products: Protecting IP and Data

Traditionally software has been distributed as a binary. The customer “grants” the binary a broad set of rights on the machine and expects the application to behave, e.g., not snoop on personal data, not add the computer to a botnet, etc. Most SaaS can be delivered with minor alterations

Is The Price Right? Dramatic Variability in Prices of Generic Goods Over Short Periods on Major Web Retailers

It used to be that retail prices of generic products like coffee mugs, soap, etc., moved slowly. Not anymore. On major web retailers like Amazon, for a range of generic household products, the variation in prices over short periods of time is immense. For instance, on 12-Piece Porcelain, 12 Oz.

Out of Network: The Tradeoffs in Using Network Based Targeting

In particular, in 521 villages in Haryana, we provided information on monthly immunization camps to either randomly selected individuals (in some villages) or to individuals nominated by villagers as people who would be good at transmitting information (in other villages). We find that the number of children vaccinated every month