|
Showing 1 - 19 of
19 matches in All Departments
No antitrust case in recent history has attracted as much public
attention as U.S v. Microsoft Corp. Nor has any antitrust case in
memory raised as many complex, substantive issues of law, economics
and public policy. Microsoft, Antitrust and the New Economy:
Selected Essays constitutes an early effort to analyze some of the
central issues and to put the case in the context of the ongoing
debate over the role of government in managing markets - especially
in technology driven New Economy industries.
All of these essays, it should be noted, are written by critics of
the government's efforts to regulate Microsoft. Indeed, many are by
individuals who were closely involved in the company's legal
defense and served as consultants to Microsoft. But their work
should be judged on the merits rather than their provenance. For
all represent serious scholarship by researchers committed to
advancing the debate over government regulatory policies.
No antitrust case in recent history has attracted as much public
attention as U.S v. Microsoft Corp. Nor has any antitrust case in
memory raised as many complex, substantive issues of law, economics
and public policy. Microsoft, Antitrust and the New Economy:
Selected Essays constitutes an early effort to analyze some of the
central issues and to put the case in the context of the ongoing
debate over the role of government in managing markets - especially
in technology driven New Economy industries. All of these essays,
it should be noted, are written by critics of the government's
efforts to regulate Microsoft. Indeed, many are by individuals who
were closely involved in the company's legal defense and served as
consultants to Microsoft. But their work should be judged on the
merits rather than their provenance. For all represent serious
scholarship by researchers committed to advancing the debate over
government regulatory policies.
By day, every year over 40,000 visitors pour in. Across the Rio
Grande, a hundred miles away, Mexican mountaineers use the white
domes as landmarks. By night, perched almost 7,000 feet above the
sleeping, earthbound world, astronomers probe the secrets of the
night sky. This is the University of Texas McDonald Observatory,
one of the world's largest university-operated astronomical
installations.
Big and Bright: A History of the McDonald Observatory is the
story of a remarkable collaboration between two major universities,
one a prestigious private school, the other a growing southwestern
state institution. The University of Chicago had astronomers, but
its Yerkes Observatory was aging and underfunded; the University of
Texas had money for an observatory but no working astronomer to
staff it. Out of their mutual need, they formed a thirty-year
compact for a joint venture. Unusual in its day, the
Yerkes-McDonald connection presaged the future. In this
arrangement, one can see some of the beginnings of today's
consortium "big science."
Now the McDonald Observatory's early history can be put in
proper perspective. Blessed with a gifted and driving founding
director, the world's (then) second-largest telescope, and an
isolation that permitted it to be virtually the only major
astronomical observatory that continued operations throughout World
War II, the staff of McDonald Observatory helped lay the
foundations of modern astrophysics during the 1940s. For over a
decade after the war, a lonely mountaintop in West Texas was the
mecca that drew nearly all the most important astronomers from all
over the world.
Based on personal reminiscences and archival material, as well
as published historical sources, Big and Bright is one of the few
histories of a major observatory, unique in its focus on the human
side of the story.
Many of the most dynamic public companies, from Alibaba to Facebook
to Visa, and the most valuable start-ups, such as Airbnb and Uber,
are matchmakers that connect one group of customers with another
group of customers. Economists call matchmakers multisided
platforms because they provide physical or virtual platforms for
multiple groups to get together. Dating sites connect people with
potential matches, for example, and ride-sharing apps do the same
for drivers and riders. Although matchmakers have been around for
millennia, they're becoming more and more popular--and
profitable--due to dramatic advances in technology, and a lot of
companies that have managed to crack the code of this business
model have become today's power brokers. Don't let the flashy
successes fool you, though. Starting a matchmaker is one of the
toughest business challenges, and almost everyone who tries to
build one, fails. In Matchmakers, David Evans and Richard
Schmalensee, two economists who were among the first to analyze
multisided platforms and discover their principles, and who've
consulted for some of the most successful platform businesses in
the world, explain how matchmakers work best in practice, why they
do what they do, and how entrepreneurs can improve their chances
for success. Whether you're an entrepreneur, an investor, a
consumer, or an executive, your future will involve more and more
multisided platforms, and Matchmakers--rich with stories from
platform winners and losers--is the one book you'll need in order
to navigate this appealing but confusing world.
Given the subject of this collection, there is some irony in how
I've chosen to bring these essays to you. Publishing has
traditionally been a two-sided model. Publishers get authors and
readers together. They typically make their money by charging the
reader and giving some fraction of the earnings to the author as
royalties. This 20th century model of publishing doesn't serve
authors of academic books well. Often, publishers set the price of
academic books relatively high, expecting to earn the greatest
profits from libraries and a handful of aficionados. For most books
that aren't aimed towards a popular audience, including most
academic books, royalties are quite small. Optimistically, I might
have been able to buy a pretty good new bicycle if I had published
these essays in the traditional fashion, but I'd rather have more
people read my work than collect the chump change from royalties.
Therefore, the two-sided publishing model fails in two ways: the
author doesn't make much money, and the author doesn't get read by
very many people. Moreover, most publishers in my experience are
still using 20th century technology to produce and distribute
books. It can take many months-if not years-from a book's
conception to its appearance in a reader's hands.And therein lies
the paradox. In order to bring my work into the 21st century, I
have decided to publish my collection of essays about two-sided
markets in a one-sided way. I ditched the intermediary and chose to
connect directly with likely readers. I'm sure some of you would
prefer the feel of paper and leather but hopefully the price is
right. It was easy for me to decide to make this volume free (a bit
more on Amazon) because it cost almost nothing to produce and
distribute it. An earlier version of this book appeared in 2010. It
consisted of a series of urls (website addresses) that took readers
to the original papers which they could then download. I promised a
real e-book in the early part of 2011. At least I got the year
right which for an economist is pretty good.
Interchange fees have become increasingly controversial. These fees
constitute the bulk of the cost that merchants incur for taking
cards because most consumers pay with a card from a four-party
system that assesses these fees. The total interchange fees paid by
merchants have increased dramatically as consumers have switched to
electronic payments. Merchants have complained, have filed
lawsuits, and have lobbied governments to do something about this.
Meanwhile governments around the world have intensified their
examination of these fees. For example, the US Congress passed
legislation in 2010 that required the Federal Reserve Board to
regulate debit card interchange fees; the Reserve Bank of Australia
decided to regulate credit card interchange fees in 2002 after
concluding that a market failure had resulted in merchants paying
fees that were too high; and in 2007 the European Commission ruled
that MasterCard's interchange fees violated the EU's antitrust
laws. The controversy raises two broad issues. The first relates to
how payment card systems decide how much merchants should pay for
taking cards either through the interchange fee for four-party
systems or the merchant discount for three party systems. The
second concerns whether the setting of interchange fees by private
businesses results in a market failure and if so what if any
regulation should be adopted to correct this market failure. This
interchange fee debate helped stimulate a new literature on
multi-sided platforms or what are sometimes called two-sided
markets. Payment card systems serve as intermediaries between
merchants and consumers and operate a platform that enables these
two different kinds of customers to interact. It turns out that
there are many other businesses that have similar features
including software platforms like the iPhone OS, shopping malls,
search engines, and exchanges. Economists have developed general
models of multi-sided businesses and applied them to payment cards.
Harnessing the power of software platforms: what executives and
entrepreneurs must know about how to use this technology to
transform industries and how to develop the strategies that will
create value and drive profits. Software platforms are the
invisible engines that have created, touched, or transformed nearly
every major industry for the past quarter century. They power
everything from mobile phones and automobile navigation systems to
search engines and web portals. They have been the source of
enormous value to consumers and helped some entrepreneurs build
great fortunes. And they are likely to drive change that will dwarf
the business and technology revolution we have seen to this point.
Invisible Engines examines the business dynamics and strategies
used by firms that recognize the transformative power unleashed by
this new revolution-a revolution that will change both new and old
industries. The authors argue that in order to understand the
successes of software platforms, we must first understand their
role as a technological meeting ground where application developers
and end users converge. Apple, Microsoft, and Google, for example,
charge developers little or nothing for using their platforms and
make most of their money from end users; Sony PlayStation and other
game consoles, by contrast, subsidize users and make more money
from developers, who pay royalties for access to the code they need
to write games. More applications attract more users, and more
users attract more applications. And more applications and more
users lead to more profits. Invisible Engines explores this story
through the lens of the companies that have mastered this
platform-balancing act. It offers detailed studies of the personal
computer, video game console, personal digital assistant, smart
mobile phone, and digital media software platform industries,
focusing on the business decisions made by industry players to
drive profits and stay a step ahead of the competition. Shorter
discussions of Internet-based software platforms provide an
important glimpse into a future in which the way we buy, pay,
watch, listen, learn, and communicate will change forever. An
electronic version of this book is available under a Creative
Commons license.
United States v. Microsoft is arguably the most important antitrust
case of the past decade. It will have major implications for how
governments regulate information technologies and the coming
Internet explosion. It will also have important consequences for
how businesses behave in the marketplace and in the political
arena. In this volume, key economists for the government and for
the Microsoft Corporation lay out their views on the key issues and
then respond to the views presented by the opposing side. The
analysis illuminates many of the complex issues involved in
assessing the appropriate scope for antitrust intervention in
information technology industries.
Sir John Herschel, one of the founders of Southern Hemisphere
astronomy, was a man of extraordinarily wide interests. He made
contributions to botany, geology, and ornithology, as well as to
astronomy, chemistry, and mathematics. Throughout his scientific
career he kept a diary, recording his public and private life. The
diaries from 1834 to 1838, years spent making astronomical
observations at the Cape of Good Hope, are reproduced in this book
and prove to be much more than an ordinary scientist's logbook.
They present personal and social history, literary commentaries,
the results of close observations of nature and numerous scientific
experiments, the excitement of travel, political intrigues, gossip,
and philosophical reflections-all interpreted through an alert and
versatile mind. In the present transcription, the material has been
enriched with selected correspondence of Sir John and his wife Lady
Herschel (nee Margaret Brodie Stewart). Sir John devoted his
working time at the Cape primarily to a systematic observation of
the southern sky, complementing his earlier "sweeping" of the
northern sky at Slough, England. He later became one of the
founders of photography, but at the Cape he used a simple optical
device, the camera lucida, in the production of numerous landscape
drawings. Many of these, along with reproductions of sketches
contained in the diaries and botanical drawings made by Sir John
and Lady Herschel, are used to illustrate this book. Sir John was
also a leading spirit in the foundation of the educational system
of the Cape and a supporter of exploratory expeditions into the
interior. As the son of Sir William Herschel, in his day the most
famous British astronomer and the discoverer of the planet Uranus,
Sir John was already celebrated when he arrived from England. Every
individual of note, resident at the Cape or visiting, went to see
him. He was supported in his work by his wife, who ran an enormous
establishment and bore a huge family, but who nevertheless found
time to travel in the country round the western Cape with him and
to assist in his observations. The diaries and letters are
supplemented by especially valuable editorial notes that provide
much needed and highly interesting information concerning persons
and events mentioned and described by Sir John. All the original
manuscript material used in this volume is held by the Harry Ransom
Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Sir John's camera
lucida drawings are from the South African Public Library in Cape
Town.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R383
R318
Discovery Miles 3 180
|