PinnedMilton Friedman and the surprising rationality of treesIn one of the most famous essays of 20th century economics, one of its most famous protagonist offers an astounding hypothesis on tree…Dec 25, 2020Dec 25, 2020
Generative AI and combinatorial optimization, part 2: Why text-based image generators can’t render…Language and chess are two of the best-known domains for combinatorial reasoning, and they share the fundamental property of all…Apr 24Apr 24
From the cornfields in Iowa to Silicon Valley: A short history of the technology adoption curveIf you had Ames, Iowa on your bingo card for hotbeds of innovation research — Bingo. The technology adoption curve (aka the most important…Apr 102Apr 102
Generative AI and combinatorial optimization, part 1: Why image generators can’t set up chess…Language and chess are two of the best-known domains for combinatorial reasoning, and they share the fundamental property of all…Apr 31Apr 31
The attention-seeking rational actorIn which we establish an underlying model for human behavior and claim that all economies are just a variation of the attention economy.Mar 17Mar 17
Stocks, flows, transformations: the cybernetic economyAn Economic Pattern Language (@econpatterns for short) takes the economy and disassembles it into its constituent parts. But first, this…Mar 71Mar 71
Bullshit, Conjecture, Empirics: the three Levels of EvidenceA popular objection to planning I keep hearing, especially in the startup world, is “but we don’t have enough data”. Indeed, not having…Sep 23, 2023Sep 23, 2023
Putting the design in mechanism designEconomic design fields — auction design, market design, mechanism design — have become success stories for economics, especially for their…Sep 9, 2023Sep 9, 2023
The Dual Roots of Belief Propagation and Causal InferenceBelief propagation and causal inference are two intertwined concepts that have emerged from distinct fields of study: econometrics and…Aug 23, 2023Aug 23, 2023
What I Do.Since I’m semi-frequently being asked about what my work entails, here is a short explainer of some of the major themes in my work put in…Aug 10, 2023Aug 10, 2023
