I’ve been busy, so some short notes of things I wish I had time to write full posts about:
We’ve got some terrific speakers at We Robot 2019, and are assembling a powerhouse set of discussants to go with them. See the preliminary We Robot program, and the preliminary pre-conference Workshop program, and register now! I’ll post the whole program here when it’s more final. And remember – it’s time to pitch a poster, which gets you in free.- The Gables Stage production of Indecent is first-rate. Great play, great production. You see it coming and it’s still harrowing. It closes in a couple of weeks, but they’ve added some performances recently so there are still tickets. I’ve been a season ticket holder for many years, and this is as good as anything they’ve done.
- Depending on what rules the AIs used, this looks like it might be an important paper to more than one field: Emilio Calvano, Giacomo Calzolari, Vincenzo Denicolò, Sergio Pastorello, Artificial intelligence, algorithmic pricing, and collusion, VOX (Feb. 03, 2019). I found the link to the the summary of the summary on Naked Capitalism. I’ve asked my library to get the paper for me. The claim is that,
[W]e experiment with pricing algorithms powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) in controlled environments (computer simulations), studying the interaction among a number of Q-learning algorithms in a workhorse oligopoly model of price competition with Logit demand and constant marginal costs. In this setting the algorithms consistently learn to charge supra-competitive prices, without communicating with one another. The high prices are sustained by classical collusive strategies with a finite phase of punishment followed by a gradual return to cooperation. This finding is robust to asymmetries in cost or demand and to changes in the number of players.
- Some USB device on my desktop computer is causing crashes after (or when?) it boots up automatically in the morning. Of course the Windows 7 (deprecation coming soon…) error messages don’t tell you which. Never happens when I start it up manually or am using it.
