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Arya Biss's avatar

What is the topic of the PHD you are working on?

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O.H. Murphy's avatar

Have you thought about the relationship between video/board game design and mechanism design in economics? Social deduction games especially seem almost like reverse revelation mechanisms.

What do you think are the most interesting results at the intersection of Computer Science and Economics?

As someone not intending to do a masters/PhD in Economics, I'd appreciate hearing what you think are the biggest topics that are missing from undergraduate courses (i.e. that I would have missed)?

What do you think of the quality of economics as presented in fiction? Can you think of any particularly good or bad examples?

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SleepingAristocrat's avatar

Why does the labor market fail to clear the way other markets do if not for active monetary policy?

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O.H. Murphy's avatar

Why do companies with rating systems (yelp, Uber, etc) often not make stars, etc limited in order to make them more credible signals?

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Nicholas Decker's avatar

Can you clarify what you mean by this, before I answer the question?

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O.H. Murphy's avatar

I guess it’s pretty vague, but I was thinking about how most reviews are done with a number out of five stars and how that results in lots of people giving five stars for normal outcomes. It seems like that kind of system can punish poor outcomes, but it fails to distinguish between normal and exceptional outcomes. Making stars or ratings limited between reviews seems like it should provide more information. For example Uber could give riders two (extra) special stars per month they can distribute on top of existing stars (limited to use within the month). This seems like this kind of thing should be used a lot more generally but it seems like it isn’t. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on why it isn’t (or maybe it is and I’m just wrong to see it as a puzzle). The topic seems related to general reputation management mechanisms, which I’m not super familiar with.

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Ishan Mukherjee's avatar

This is an interesting question I'd like to know the answer to, too.

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O.H. Murphy's avatar

It’s fine if you don’t have a clear empirical answer. I’m mostly interested in what costs I might be failing to model when thinking about this.

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Sam Harsimony's avatar

If a monetary authority had to commit to a certain algorithm for its decision making, which algorithm is best?

What weird ideas have you heard about for dealing with patents and intellectual property?

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