Ban the Box, Criminal Records, and Racial Discrimination: A Field Experiment by Amanda Agan and Sonja Starr
Main finding: Restricting employers from asking about their criminal history can lead to more discrimination based on race.
Economic Analysis of Business Practice
The passage of time has not been kind to the economic arguments underlying the Paramount decision. Kenney and Klein (1983) and Hanssen (2000) provide efficiency rationales for block booking. De Vany and Eckert (1991) and Orbach and Einav (2007) discuss how minimum ticket prices reduced monitoring costs. De Vany and Eckert (1991) argue that the system of runs, clearances, and zoning served to provide low-cost access to large numbers of filmgoers.
And as millennials come to appreciate the debt load they’re expected to burden over the next two to three decades – the average Chicago household is on the hook for at least $125,000 in state and local pension debt – expect more of them to head for the border.
Thursday morning, Wawa opened its doors — and its gas pumps — just a block from the two gas stations closest to Orlando International Airport that charge much higher than market prices: $5.99 a gallon. Those prices leave a bad taste in the mouths of unsuspecting vacationers in a hurry to top off their rental cars before flying home.
Wawa, the convenience store with a cultlike following, will feature a bright electronic sign advertising its normal market-rate gasoline. To promote its opening, Wawa was charging $2.99 a gallon this morning, well below the Orlando average of $3.45 per gallon of regular.
That's good news to consumers stuck paying the inflated rates.
"This is ridiculous," businessman Joseph Kutka said this week after paying $70.40 to gas up his rental at Suncoast Energys before catching a flight back to Wisconsin. Like most customers at Suncoast and across the street at Sun Gas, Kutka didn't notice the price until the fuel was flowing. "They're scamming their customers. I would have stopped somewhere else if I'd known."
After years of complaints, will Wawa and the free market force prices lower? It's possible.
"At this point, we haven't made a decision," Sun Gas co-owner Larry Nieves said Wednesday. "We haven't decided what we're going to do."
Everybody Lies offers fascinating, surprising, and sometimes laugh-out-loud insights into everything from economics to ethics to sports to race to sex, gender and more, all drawn from the world of big data. What percentage of white voters didn’t vote for Barack Obama because he’s black? Does where you go to school effect how successful you are in life? Do parents secretly favor boy children over girls? Do violent films affect the crime rate? Can you beat the stock market? How regularly do we lie about our sex lives and who’s more self-conscious about sex, men or women?
Suppose your strategy for predicting the stock market is to find a lucky coin -- but one that will be found through careful testing. Here's your methodology: You label one thousand coins - 1 to 1,000. Every morning, for two years, you flip each coin, record whether it came up heads or tails, and then note whether the Standard & Poor's Index went up or down that day. You pore through all your data. And voila! You've found something. It turns out that 70.3 percent of the time when Coin 391 came up heads the S&P Index rose. The relationship is statistically significant! Highly so! You have found your lucky coin!
Just flip Coin 391 every morning and buy stocks whenever it comes up heads. Your days of Target T-shirts and ramen noodle dinners are over. Coin 391 is your ticket to the good life!
- No profit if no agreements are made.
- $4 profit if the retailer sells only Coke.
- $4 profit if the retailer sells only Pepsi.
- $5 profit if retailer sells both Coke and Pepsi.
- what matters (the number of switching consumers, which measures the degree of substitution between the goods);
- why it matters (the higher the number of switchers, the better the retailer’s bargaining alternatives); and
- how much it matters (the retailer captures the lion’s share of the profit)
r=$2.50, (c+p)=$2.50
r =$4.50, p=$0.50.
Alberto Garzón, head of the United Left coalition, went even further: “Private banks are thieves, they are the main enemy of democracy and they are responsible for gutting our economies. A majority of the Supreme Court sides with them, ratifying that justice has a price and that the system is rotten and spent,” he tweeted.
TagTrade accurately predicted the delay or on-time schedule of major initiatives including new services, IT initiatives, and store openings. Additionally, the Best Buy TagTrade market proved to be more accurate than traditional forecasts, and in some cases 5% more accurate in predicting sales forecasts, such as media sales during the quarter.
...forecasts used for New Product Introductions (NPI) and longer-term capacity requirements planning.
“We believe the European Commission’s online shopping decision underestimates the value of those kinds of fast and easy connections. While some comparison shopping sites naturally want Google to show them more prominently, our data show that people usually prefer links that take them directly to the products they want, not to websites where they have to repeat their searches.”
HBO, which boasts such premium programming as “Game of Thrones,” “Silicon Valley” and “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” has long maintained amicable relations with its distribution partners because it relies on them to help market its channels.
But now HBO has a new corporate owner — AT&T — which also owns Dish’s biggest competitor, DirecTV. The dispute centers on how much Dish Network Corp. will pay to carry HBO and Cinemax. The blackout affects about 2.5 million of the 13 million Dish customers, including those who subscribe to Sling TV, and creates a public relations nightmare for AT&T.
Kalnins, Arturs and Froeb, Luke M. and Tschantz, Steven T., Mergers Increase Output When Firms Compete by Managing Revenue. Vanderbilt Law and Economics Research Paper No. 10-27. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1670278 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1670278
If you went on Ticketmaster in January and pulled up a third-row seat for Taylor Swift‘s June 2nd show at Chicago’s Soldier Field, it would have cost you $995. But if you looked up the same seat three months later, the price would have been $595. That’s because Swift has adopted “dynamic pricing,” where concert tickets – like airline seats – shift prices constantly in adjusting to market demand. It’s a move intended to squeeze out the secondary-ticket market – but it’s also left many fans confused as they’re asked to pay hundreds of dollars more than face value. “Basically, Ticketmaster is operating as StubHub,” says one concert-business source.
Businesses including Coke and big U.S. airlines have said their higher prices aren’t denting demand.
“The economy is healthy,” Delta Air Lines Inc. Chief Executive Ed Bastian said in September. “To the extent oil prices were to continue to rise, we expect to be able to pass along the cost of that.”
Margin
|
Quantity
|
Profit
|
(7-1)=6
|
1
|
6
|
(6-2)=4
|
2
|
8
|
(5-3)=2
|
3
|
6
|
(4-4)=0
|
4
|
0
|
Margin
|
Drivers
|
Riders
|
Profit
|
(9-2)=7
|
2
|
1
|
7
|
(8-3)=5
|
3
|
2
|
10
|
(7-4)=3
|
4
|
3
|
9
|
(6-5)=1
|
5
|
4
|
4
|
We wrote a managerial economics textbook (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Cengage) to teach students how to solve business problems (7 min. video). We started this blog to support those who use the book, and to keep up with developments in the field.