Harold Demsetz. An Appreciation.
By Thomas Hubbard.
I learned this morning that Harold Demsetz passed away last week. He was 88.
Articles from Digitopoly
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Smart Contracts with Fine Print
From its very early days, one of the main areas where blockchain enthusiasts argued there was potential for radical innovation was in the ability of the technology to house smart contracts. The Ethereum network was designed with this in mind: to be a distributed ledger with a ‘Turing complete’ virtual machine on top of it.
2018 Digital Year in Review
It is time once again to give awards for the biggest events in IT in 2018. And what a fun year to review! So many crazy events deserve ridicule. Where to start?
On Facebook’s management and regulatory approach
At a conference in Brussels last week I made a short speech about Facebook and its poor approach to regulatory management and innovation. I refer at the end to this paper from The Hamilton Project.
Free Software without a Free Lunch or Free Beer
Economists like to say that there are no free lunches. How does that attitude apply to free software and services? It is no secret that many prominent platforms give away services, and so do many widely used open-source projects. The answer should help us understand our world.
A pound of flesh for touching the progress of science
I should have gone straight to Wikipedia. Instead I put the Latin words “In Situ” into Google. The dermatologist had spelled it for me, and the Wikipedia entry appeared at the top. It said the following, “In archaeology, in situ refers to an artifact that has not been moved from its original place of deposition.
Can the Blockchain make teams work?
Today, in prominent economists doing the blockchain we have Al Roth. According to Bloomberg, he has signed on as an advisor to Covee; a blockchain startup creating a market for knowledge workers.
A Nobel Prize for Breaking Through Hurdles Placed by Economists
This year’s Nobel Prize in Economics has been shared by Bill Nordhaus and Paul Romer for “integrating innovation and climate with economic growth.” That is one way to thread the needle to link these fine recipients and I applaud the Nobel Committee for finding a way to do it.
Selling Predictions on the Blockchain
Numerai is a blockchain startup. with a cryptocurrency boldly named Numeraire. They have just proposed a marketplace for predictions called Erasure. The premise is that there are lots of people out there with some ability — it may be divine or it may be that they have data and a good statistical model — to predict things.
Independence is no disruption solution
One of the themes in The Disruption Dilemma, is that when a firm faces disruption, it is unlikely that the Clay Christensen promoted solution of setting up an independent business unit to compete with startups and itself in that new space will work. There are many reasons for this including, most importantly, that the last thing an incumbent wants is to speed up competitive pressures against itself.