• Planetary defence and offence

    Last week, NASA launched the first spacecraft intended to deflect an asteroid. The asteroid in question is 6 million miles away, but the goal of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission is to push the asteroid and see what happens … Continued

  • Algorithmic pricing

    Christos has suggested this week’s topic of Competition and Algorithmic pricing. His suggestion is motivated by these two recent papers: Mackay and Brown (2021) ‘Competition in Algorithmic Pricing‘ and Assad et al (2020) on the use of algo pricing in German … Continued

  • Arm wrestle

    Arm Holdings is the largest company in Cambridge, or at least it was until it was acquired shortly after the Brexit vote in 2016, by Softbank, the Japanese conglomerate. One reason Arm is not terribly well known (even in Cambridge!) … Continued

  • Regulating NFTs

    Our ‘textbook’ discussion of how regulation can be justified was in the context of market failures.  Using this lens, most of the historical cases seem pretty straightforward (at least in retrospect!). But (how) should regulation address something novel like non-fungible tokens … Continued

  • Institutions and climate action

    In a recent tweet, Jesus suggested a topic that was, perhaps, inevitable to be our focus during a week when world leaders assembled in Glasgow for the first major climate conference held in the UK. His question: ‘which institutions (rules of … Continued

  • A bad month for Facebook (or is it Meta?!) – but what are we actually worried about?

    Diego already pointed to this week’s topic: Facebook (even if last week’s topic was intellectual property!) In her testimony before the US Congress, Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower highlighted the dangers posed by its algorithms. In some circles, such as The … Continued