We propose that viewing the phenomenon of online dating as a means to reduce market frictions is sufficient to explain the vast majority of changes in outcomes, with other variables having scalar effects
Tag: markets
All wealth
Preventing AI collusion
Finding ways to prevent collusion between self-learning algorithms might be one of the biggest challenges that competition law enforcers have ever faced
Insider traders
Insider traders appear to be pretty careful in choosing their accomplices. Of the known pairs of people who provide and act upon private information (“tipper and tippee”), 64% met before college, and 16% met in college or graduate school. Another 23% are family relations — more siblings and parents than aunts and uncles, despite the added capital that the latter might have provided. Tips are also commonly shared among people with ethnically similar surnames: Of 24 tips coming from people with Celtic surnames, for example, 14 went to individuals who also had Celtic surnames.
Mormon boob jobs
I wanted to show that god-fearing folks steeped in old-fashioned values are just as susceptible to the effects of shifting sex ratios as cosmopolitan, hookup-happy 20-somethings who frequent Upper East Side wine bars. I have seen more outrageous boob jobs and facial plastic surgery in Utah than almost anywhere in the country—especially among Mormon women. They may claim chastity as a virtue overall, but that’s not stopping anyone from getting a set of double-Ds.
Ashley Madison doesn’t exist
Out of 5.5M female accounts, ~0% had ever shown any kind of activity at all, after the day they were created. The men’s accounts tell a story of lively engagement with the site, with over 20M men hopefully looking at their inboxes, and over 10M of them initiating chats. The women’s accounts show so little activity that they might as well not be there.
this is trolling as an art form
Microbial markets
A large fraction of microbial life exists in complex communities where the exchange of molecules and proteins is vital for their survival. They trade these essential resources to promote their own growth in ways that are similar to countries that exchange goods in modern economic markets.
Synthetic poaching
We are fabricating wildlife products, such as rhino horn and elephant ivory, at prices below the levels that induce poaching. Our goal is to replace the illegal wildlife trade, a $20B black market, the fourth largest after drug, arms, and human trafficking, with sustainable commerce.
people will have to decide whether they can get over their fears of biotech for this.
Amazon Marketplace Bots
more mundane singularity happenings:
There are whole species of other bots that infest the Amazon Marketplace, pretending to have used copies of books, fighting epic price wars no one ever sees. So with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read.
Robot Traders
The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending 1000s of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there’s no way they’d ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.
just robot traders crossing in the night, or deliberate addition of noise?
Gregor J. Rothfuss 