John List on Insights From Uber, Paying Bonuses and Scaling Ideas

This podcast is sponsored by Masterworks, the first platform for buying and selling shares representing an investment in iconic artworks. They are making it possible to invest in multimillion-dollar works from artists like Banksy, Kaws, Basquiat, and many more. John is the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago. His new book is The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale. He has worked with firms such as Lyft, Uber, Citadel and several non-profits. His academic research includes more than 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and several published books. John was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and a fellow of the Econometric Society in 2015. He is a current editor of the Journal of Political Economy. In this podcast we discuss:

The importance of field experiments and scaling in economics, what John learned at Uber, and the optimal way to get tips. He also discussed how to avoid false positives, thinking about spillovers and network effects, avoiding the cost trap, and how to incentivize scaling. On a more personal side, John revealed the books that influenced him the most: Wealth of Nations (Smith), The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), Principles of Economics (Marshall), Economics (Samuelson), Elementary Principles of Economics (Fisher).