How Did You Obtain the Management Intelligence Required to Succeed at Google?

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So I build smart AI. I just tell it maximize profits. Yeah. And then it, in essence, colludes with the other smart AI's, and they keep prices high, they're strict output. Right. But again, then there's somebody that's outside of that little duopoly, and there's a triopoly and a quadripley, and so on. It gets harder and harder to coordinate all of those activities,. especially if you've got an agent on the consumer side who's looking for the lowest price all the time. You've got to think of these markets where you may have active price setting on the viewpoint of the AI's but you've also got active

Before he became the Adam Smith of Googlenomics, Hal Varian spent decades as an academic economist, writing influential papers, a popular book about the information economy, and several textbooks that are still taught today. So how has his nearly twenty years in the business world affected what he’d write and teach now? Is learning Shephard’s lemma really that important anymore?

Tyler asks Hal these questions and more: why aren’t there more second-priced auctions — or prediction markets? How have the economics of sales changed with the internet? In what ways did his hiring criteria change between academia and business? What could we learn from the sack of Rome? When should economists avoid looking at the literature? How are we always eking out victory in the war on spam? And what are people least likely to understand about Google? Fear not — Hal has an answer for it all.

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Recorded May 10th, 2019 Other ways to connect

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