July 2005 Archives

I'm reading Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life. Aside from being the most expansive introduction to game theory on the market, the historical stories and anecdotes are very interesting. For example the following paragraph is quoted from page 227:

"To arrange a self-enforcing cartel is difficult. It is all the better if an outsider enforces the collective agreement limiting competition. This is just what happened for cigarette advertising, although not intentionally. In the old days, cigarette companies used to spend money to convince consumers to 'walk a mile' for their product or to 'fight rather than switch.' The different campaigns made advertising agencies rich, but their main purpose was defensive - each company advertised because the others did too. Then, in 1968, cigarette advertisements were banned from TV by law. The companies thought this restriction would hurt them and fought against it. But, when the smoke cleared, they saw that the ban helped them avoid mutually damaging and costly advertising campaigns and thus improved their profits."

Well congratulations to the federal government on another job well done.

I can't stress enough how great the internet is at progressing academic study. The production costs of sharing and or publishing material is almost infinitely low. As such it makes the opportunity of publishing accessable to more people. Take me for example, a lowly graduate student and here I am publishing material to all who wish to find it. A similar heart warming example, is a recent find on Allen Dalton's syllabus for principles of macroeconomics, where he lists my Taco Bell article as one of the required readings.

This lecture represents my initial thoughts in response to the Critical Infrastructure Protection Project, which I attended in the spring. I'm currently working on a response paper as well.

The process of learning the technological logistics of web publishing is long and winding. It is with great relief that I am pleased to host my presentation from the Austrian Scholar's Conference 2005, entitled Blacks and Whites behind Bars.

I was recently interviewed by a student reporter for an article on blogging in the Auburn student newspaper; Students go blog wild.

This is the ongoing outline I've constructed to work through my macroeconomics prelim. As the dates of each exam are approaching, I'm noticing the amount of time that outlining is taking up so I may restrain from completeing them to focus more on reading and absorbing the material then turning attentionto forming responses to sample prelim questions.

Once again the yellow notes represent particular Austrian observations.