#TBT: Looking at kitchen history on this Throwback Thursday, we can decide what a new kitchen from the 1920s says about us.…
Deciding If Your Digital Assistant Is Unethical
Creating a long list of ethical dilemmas, Google’s Duplex is a digital assistant that sounds just like a human when scheduling appointments.…
The Choices That Elevators Make
Assume that you are on the seventh floor waiting for one of three elevators. Car 1 can arrive in 15 seconds but the total wait time will be 25 seconds because it has a stop on the eighth floor. Closer…
How to Find Your Match
Creating more efficient markets, matching algorithms facilitate supply and demand when transactions do not involve money.…
The Connection Between a Killer Plant and Elmer's Glue
An innovation being sold to manufacturers, jars with slippery interior surfaces will create positive externalities by lessening waste and saving time.…
Starbucks Drive-Through Economics
My new Starbucks has a drive-through. If you look at a high shelf near the window through which the baristas hand the coffee and food to drivers, you see a screen with little cars and numbers. Changin…
Cheesecake Medicine?
Could Cheesecake Factory help us fix our healthcare system? Touring the kitchen of a Cheesecake Factory restaurant, you would see arrival, refrigeration and storage areas, and cutting, mixing, choppin…
Election Economics: Assessing Outsourcing
Until November 6, at econlife, Mondays will be about presidential election economics. In 2004, when President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers chairman, Harvard professor Greg Mankiw, was lam…
Your Airfare and Airline Profits
What does your airline ticket pay for? In order of size, these represent the expenses for a US Airways flight according to WSJ journalist Scott McCartney: Fuel (close to 30%) Salaries (maybe 20%) Buyi…
A Better Ketchup Bottle?
In a 1964 TV commercial, during a pouring contest between 2 young boys, Heinz ketchup was “…too thick and rich to run.” In another ad, Heinz lost an OK Coral duel because it was the …