Comments on: This is not the market you read about.

By: Jay Carlson

Jay Carlson — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:40:06 +0000

There’s still plenty of end-user developed Excel and Access apps wandering around, annoying the “professionals”.

If SOA isn’t just short for SOAP, it’s a political movement to re-empower business units, parts of the organization chartered for operations, not running computers. “All data and services belong to central IT” has backlash.

By: bhyde

bhyde — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:10:21 +0000

Jay – Thanks for the recommendation! It’s amusing to draw the connection between ‘closed world’ and the computer room. I’ve written before about who disconcerting it is for 80′s computer people, who were centered on empowering the end user, to observe the rush back into big data centers. … hm.

By: Jay Carlson

Jay Carlson — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 17:52:54 +0000

Groupware developers, or at least the successful ones, get smacked by closed world assumptions the moment they deploy. I’d like to think that we end up more skeptical about living in models as a result.

If you haven’t, you probably want to read _The Closed World_ by Paul N. Edwards.

By: bhyde

bhyde — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 15:07:33 +0000

Ha, interesting that I said humanities. Revealing. I think i meant to say social sciences. The rest of the social sciences have collected lots and lots of curious behavior patterns about humans, the behavioral economics guys seem to be doing nothing more than dusting a very select few of these off and running experiments with tokens so they can call it economics.

By: Edward Vielmetti

Edward Vielmetti — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 13:43:59 +0000

Economics doesn’t consider itself a branch of the humanities; it thinks of itself as a natural science, or perhaps an offshoot of mathematics. So to break out of the world view of the weird automaton of the decision making of “homo economicus” into something even slightly informed by actual human behavior is a breakthrough.

By: bhyde

bhyde — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:34:15 +0000

I’m unimpressed by behavioral economics. It is, apparently, a long and tedious effort to rediscover everything known to the rest of humanities while calling it economics. It’s fine as far as it goes, shrug.

By: Edward Vielmetti

Edward Vielmetti — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:16:49 +0000

The piece of economics you want to look at is “behavioral economics”, or the study of decision making in the presence of money.

here is a good start, from 2008

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/thaler_sendhil08/thaler_sendhil_index.html

with thoughtful commentary beyond the sound bite

By: bhyde

bhyde — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:16:47 +0000

Yes indeed! But what’s particularly amusing about that is that if you go read the literature on how to design massively multiplayer games for fun and profit the advice doesn’t sound at all like economics! See for example Amy Jo Kim’s work – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihUt-163gZI – or the stuff about assuring the players get an controlled emotional roller coaster ride.

By: Edward Vielmetti

Edward Vielmetti — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:56:53 +0000

Real markets are multiplayer games! And like all MMOs there are the rules within the game, and the rules external to the game.