Where are they now- Susan Athey

She's now the Chief Economist for Microsoft

A summary of her research areas

Economics 1056: Market Design- an undergraduate course on Market Design taught by Athey

Assorted

Felix Salmon wins the American Statistical Association's Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award

What Happens in Europe, Stays in Europe?

Spring Break and Game Theory Books

The Rise and Fall of the G.D.P.

Metric Mania

A New Game in Town -Predictalot

Predictalot ;

The basic game play is simple: select a prediction type, customize it, and invest points on it. Yet you'll never run out of odds to explore: you can make hundreds of millions of predictions! The odds on each update are continuously based on other players' predictions and the on-court action...

n technical terms, Predictalot is a combinatorial prediction market of the sort academics like Yahoo! and George Mason University professor Robin Hanson have been dreaming about since early in the decade...

With 9.2 quintillion outcomes, Predictalot is to our knowledge the largest prediction market built, testing the limits of what the wisdom of crowds can produce. Predictalot is a game, and we hope it's fun to play. We'd also like to pave the way for serious use of combinatorial prediction market technology.

Markets like Predictalot, WeatherBill, CombineNet, and Internet advertising systems, to name a few, represent the evolution of markets in the digital age, empowering users with extreme customization

Sex, Lies and Economists

Sounds like an interesting book project;

A short chapter will cover Bernard Mandeville, author of "An Essay upon Whoring: A Modest Defence of Publick Stews," which made the case for state-run brothels. He congratulated the city fathers of Amsterdam for tolerating "Houses in which Women are hired as publickly as Horses at a Livery Stable." Mandeville's simultaneous celebration of both free markets and licentious behavior posed a problem for Adam Smith's generation, which had to find a way to respond to Mandeville in making their case for markets on ethical grounds. Mandeville reappears centuries later in Keynes' General Theory, in making his case for the need to stimulate demand.