Selling Consultants and Buying Quality: EBay has been struggling for a while now and, although the company’s stock experienced a boost after it beat some analyst expectations, this quarters results were still less than stellar (profit down 29%, revenue down 4%). This article from Aliaba.com delves deeply into EBay’s problems (a major one cited is too many consultants who look at everything as a case study) and the initiatives EBay is undertaking to right its course. One of the more interesting among these efforts is offering greater discounts in seller fees to “Power Sellers” who have received a lot of positive feedback, perhaps an effort to improve the number of quality products on EBay and lessen its “bargain basement” reputation. A significant risk in the auction business is that the market essentially becomes a race to bottom or as game theorists would call it, a “lemon market.” To summarize this theory, buyers are only willing to pay the value of a low quality widget (e.g. one with defects) because they are not able to evaluate the product to verify its quality while the seller has full knowledge of quality. This buyer behavior in turn means that only low quality widgets will be put up for sale because prevailing prices will be below the value of a high quality widget. But at the end of the day would you trust boulder_boy272 regardless of his seller rating as much as you would Amazon.com?
This is Your Brain on Twitter: A year ago, before Twitter was Twitter and Obama Obama, the Atlantic Magazine ran a widely discussed cover article asking, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Echoing the I-can’t-spell-because-of-spellcheck refrain, author Nicholas Carr posited that our conscious frame of reference has become so plastered by the contemporary firehouse of entertainment and data flow that humans now have a diminished capacity for refined thinking. Jamais Coscio, writing in the same publication a year later, argues the opposite: Human beings may have lost a step in skills like rote memorization, but they have improved dramatically in the more important cognitive arena of pattern recognition. In “Get Smarter,” Coscio argues that our brain’s basement might be flooded but we will soon develop the tools to drain the dreck. Along with pharmacology to help us autofocus, we will program the programs (“exocortical technology”) to discern what deserves our precious priority and what data is merely drivel. But even before we develop these tools we as a species will likely adapt to the data flow and boost our “fluid intelligence,” the ability to “find meaning in confusion and to solve new problems, independent of acquired knowledge.” Playfully, the author even touches on the likelihood of genetic brain modification and cerebral hardware enhancements: won’t happen, he says, as no first mover will step forward knowing he’ll be obsolete in six months. No one, apparently, wants to be the Commodore 64 in the Brain Game.
