Author Archives: skornick

  One of my favorite game theory topics is matching markets. Matching markets are the markets in which both sides of the market have preferences.  Examples of these markets include college admissions., job searches, and dating. I love the intersection of dating and economics because I think it is a cool easily accessible front for which to understand some Econ concepts. This paper, which is targeted towards an audience with a pretty solid economic background walks through some of the applications of Gale Shapley and Adachi model to talk about how this market functions. They then break down some of Continue reading Matching Sorting Dating Oh My! →

When two people have different understandings of a payout matrix then the option that is one persons thinks are the option then it is not really an option.  I am constantly irritating my friends by making them sit down and draw out our arguments as payout matrixes. They hate when I do this but I always have a great time.  This weekend I was sitting on the couch with my friend and future housemate Nate when he made the “joke” that he was going to put water in my cast iron pan. Now if you have never invested in cultivating Continue reading Turning Fights into Matrixes→

Looking to pick up a book for some fun econ reading? I would highly recommend Paul Oyer’s Everything I Ever Needed to Know About Economics I Learned From Online Dating. This book brings some of the concepts looked at across economics classes and applies them to dating. The book is engaging funny and easy to follow even for a non-economics major. IT is structured by the concept and all concepts have an example of the economics concept in dating and in a separate industry. My favorite two topics covered were cheap talk and network externalities. Cheap talk is the idea Continue reading Swipe Right on Paul Oyer→

How many utils do you get from making a joke that gets the whole room laughing? Thinking about the value of a joke helped me find some interesting articles around the web. The economics of jokes is an interesting market. This planet money episode talks about the market for jokes, and the intellectual property challenges that the internet brings up. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/04/06/710404524/episode-904-joke-theft  The planet money episode talks about joke theft interviewing Christopher Sprigman who wrote: “There’s No Free Laugh (Anymore): The Emergence of Intellectual Property Norms and the Transformation of Stand-Up Comedy”. This episode talks about how copywriting is very expensive Continue reading The economics of Jokes→

Tinder has changed the way that my generation views dating and hooking up. Tinder’s presence has changed the way that people indicate a preference for another person. One of the reasons that it has been able to do this so successfully is by taking the first interaction from a dynamic game to a static game. A dynamic game is one in which moves are sequential someone makes the first move and someone makes the second. A static game is one in which the moves happen at the same time. In the real world, someone always makes the first move; it Continue reading to swipe or not to swipe→