miscellaneous factZ

7/10. Well written and fascinating, particularly in its clear demonstration of the way the French just ‘gave up’ (both generally in the inter-war period and in 1940 itself). I would have preferred more analytical clarity regarding exactly when things went wrong and why — at some moments Horne seems to be suggesting that a sufficiently active response by the French in the first few days (between the 12th and the 14th of May) might have made a decisive difference in reversing the tide, at others that the Germans superiority in weapons, tactics and men (quality, not necessarily quantity) meant that France was doomed from the start. The relative success of the few British salleys against the Germans make me incline more towards the former possibility. I also think this view may be warranted by the concerns evinced so frequently by those within the German General Staff (and Hitler himself) about the vulnerability of their flanks, as well as the huge convoys through the Ardennes, in the first few decisive days of the battle. If this is the case, it shows that what is today considered one of the greatest and most brilliant military victories of all time might well have ended up as another failed Schlieffen plan.

4/10. Abysmal and travesty of previous outings. The plotting was so casual as to be insulting, compared to previous outings the set-pieces were very weak, and the reintroduction of Marion (by the most creaky of plot devices) only served to emphasize how far from the original this had fallen (and how dependent on derivative recycling this was). I doubted that Lucas’s (responsible for the story) reputation could fall much further after the debacle of the Star Wars prequels but I was wrong.

One the major things I’ve been working on since last summer (other than the work on Trading Funds) is a paper on search engines such as those provided by firms like Google, Yahoo! etc. The first complete version of this is now ready for public consumption. Entitled Is Google the next Microsoft? Competition, Welfare and Regulation in Internet Search I’ve posted it online at:

http://rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/search_engines.pdf

Abstract

Internet search (or perhaps more accurately ‘web-search’) has grown exponentially over the last decade at an even more rapid rate than the Internet itself. Starting from nothing in the 1990s, today search is a multi-billion dollar business. Search engine providers such as Google and Yahoo! have become household names, and the use of a search engine, like use of the Web, is now a part of everyday life. The rapid growth of online search and its growing centrality to the ecology of the Internet raise a variety of questions for economists to answer. Why is the search engine market so concentrated and will it evolve towards monopoly? What are the implications of this concentration for different `participants’ (consumers, search engines, advertisers)? Does the fact that search engines act as ‘information gatekeepers’, determining, in effect, what can be found on the web, mean that search deserves particularly close attention from policy-makers? This paper supplies empirical and theoretical material with which to examine many of these questions. In particular, we (a) show that the already large levels of concentration are likely to continue (b) identify the consequences, negative and positive, of this outcome (c) discuss the possible regulatory interventions that policy-makers could utilize to address these.

I’ve added a reasonably detailed treatment of Stackelberg Competition to the Atlas (of Economic Models).

6.5/10. Engaging first-feature from Lebanese director and actress Nadine Lebaki.

5.5/10. Disappointing though perhaps because of the high expectations engendered by the book’s reputation. To my mind, the book has not dated well and the general insights regarding working practices set out in the afterword seem debatable (the Machine referred to in the title is not the computer but the organizationthat built it).

6/10. Interesting though, as usual with these things, the book is long on personality, anecdote and rumour, and a bit too short on factual details of what exactly happened (roughly LTCM made ever more leveraged bets on ever less liquid and well understood products and got mashed up when a crisis came along and everyone ran for the door).

Interesting side points that are alleged (but not confirmed) include Goldman Sachs using their position as potential buyer/rescuer to gain privileged access to LTCM’s position and then front-running them (i.e. selling those positions out from under LTCM thereby helping Goldman and harming LTCM).

After attending the IIOC conference last year I was back this weekend at the 2008 IIOC event which took place at Marymount University in Virginia. I presented the latest version of two of my papers: The Control of Porting in Two-Sided Markets and Forever Minus a Day? Theory and Empirics of Optimal Copyright Term.

I also provided discussant comments on Christopher Ellis’s and Wesley Wilson’s paper entitled Cartels, Price-Fixing, and Corporate Leniency Policy:What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us Stronger. In addition I include below some very partial notes on some of the sessions I attended — though activity in this regard was rather limited by the fact that, though there were more papers overall than last year (388 in total), sessions were organized into more breadth and less length.

Transaction Costs and Trolls: the Behaviour of Individual Inventors, Small Firms and Entrepreneurs in Patent Litigation (Gwendolyn Ball and Jay Kesan)

• Explore settlements in relation to patents. Questions:
  • How often do settlements happen relative to litigation
  • Are small firm and entrepreneurs at a major disadvantage in defending their patents
  • Or do patent trolls' use the threaof litigation toextort’ payments
    • NTP vs. RIM ($612M)
    • Saffron vs. Boston Scientific ($412M to individual doctor who had an infringed heart stent patent)
  • Does nature of defendant/plaintiff (L/M/S) affect likelihood of settlement
• Existing databases not so great
  • Only list trial outcomes not pre-trial outcomes
  • Often only list primary plaintiffs
  • Fix this and link patent litigation to companies
• Results
  • Claimed usually that 95% cases settle
    • In fact 8% are resolved at pre-trial (still expensive)
    • 4% settled at trial
    • so ~ 88% settle
  • Troll stuff:
    • 97 licensing firms as plaintiffs (none as defendants). These may be classic trolls but they are a small part of overall litigation.
    • Evidence shows that entrepreneurs and small inventors are very active (so do not seem particularly disadvantaged) and often sue each other rather than larger firms
    • Crudely: small inventors more likely to pursue a case to the end than large litigators
• Discussant comments:
  • Bessen and Meurer find $28M hit on firms facing litigation
  • Issues of correlated errors across cases
• My comments:
  • probably need to disaggregate across areas — after all no-one has suggested ‘trolling’ is an issue in traditional pharma
  • (for me) it would be useful to have an idea how many cases ’settle’ at the ‘letter stage’, that is, before anything even turns up in the court system. After all you only get to the courts (even with preliminaries) if you cannot sort out a license.

Prior Art - To Search or Not to Search (Vidya Atal)

• Alcacer + Gittelman 2006 showed 40% had prior art added by USPTO examiner
• 2/3 citations on an average patent added by USPTO
• Langinier + Marcoul (2003), Lampe (2007) — incentive to disclose prior art
• Issue of bad (non-novel) patents may be because people have poor incentives to search
• Mainly related this to fact that even a bad patent (if it gets past examination) has a +ve payoff

Distributed versioning systems (VCMs) have now matured to the point that I’ve been planning to switch from subversion for quite a while — at least for own personal repositories where there are no coordination issues. Having chosen mercurial (hg) as my DVCM of choice the next step was to actually convert. While there is quite a bit of documentation on this topic available online I didn’t always find these had the necessary info. Combined with my experience of several ’snags’ along the way I thought it worth documenting my experience in case it proves useful to others.

I’d waited until hg 0.9.5 was available on my distro precisely because I wanted to use the hg convert functionality (alteratives such as tailor looked to have difficulties and though it turned out I could have used hgsvn without problem my original impression of it had been it was oriented for integration of hg and svn rather than straight conversion).

Before I docment the steps it is important to get clear one v. important thing about how hg works:

There is no distinction between a working copy and a repository.

In particular, each repository is a working copy and vice versa. The actual repo is stored inside the working copy at its root in a .hg directory. When you ‘checkout’ (svn terminology) you do so simply by ‘cloning’ an existing repository (or if just want a limited set of changes — e.g. those since you lasted ‘updated’ (svn terminology) you can do a ‘pull’). In fact you could even just make a plain copy that .hg directory and send it to someone — though obviously this might not work so well if you are moving between 2 OSs with different filesystems.

Anyway, the main point to take from this is that the result of an hg convert will simply be a new directory with all the files (the working copy) plus a .hg directory in that directory (the repo).

To convert all you do is::

$ hg convert <svn-repo-or-co> <some-new-directory>

The devil however is in the detail:

1. svn-repo-or-co can be the uri of a subversion repo or the path of a svn checkout. Where a checkout hg convert will just work out the source repo and pull from there
   1. Note however hg convert will not move across working copy files themselves. The obvious solution to this is to do the convert and then just move the .hg file across into your svn checkout and delete all the .svn directories (or vice-versa)
2. some-new-directory: this is where the new hg repo/working copy with end up.
3. After doing hg convert rather surprisingly all of the files in the new hg repository will be listed as ‘?’ (not tracked) when you do a hg status. To solve this just do a hg update
4. To speed up conversions it is often worth getting a local copy of the subversion repo (to save pulling lots of stuff over the network connection). To do this either use svnsync or just dump the remote repo and load into a local one (if converting from a working copy you’ll then just need to do a svn switch --relocate
5. My repository did not have a branches/tags/trunk layout (instead it has multiples subprojects …). This led to weird errors involving files and directories at the root of the repository which looked like: ‘hg convert abort: path contains illegal component’. I solved this by using the --filemap option to hg convert and putting explicit renames of the form: /root-path-1 root-path-1 in that file.
6. What do you for all the other working copies once you have converted the repo/your working copy? This is now simple:
   1. Clone your hg repo to each of the machines with a working copy.
      • For this purpose you will probably want to make your original hg repo available over the Internet using either ssh or http protocols (for details see mercurial docs).
        1. Copy over the svn working files into that new hg repo

Today I’ll be presenting my paper Forever Minus a Day? Theory and Empirics of Optimal Copyright Term at Stanford in the Social Science and Technology Seminar Series (also here).

This new paper is a heavily revised version of the copyright-term specific portions of my original ‘Forever Minus a Day’ paper (see post from last summer). The rest of the original paper can now be found in Optimal Copyright over Time: Technological Change and the Stock of Works which was published in the December issue of the Review of Economic Research on Copyright Issues (RERCI).

Update post-talk (2008-05-16): the slides are now online at:

http://rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/optimal_copyright_term_talk_stanford.pdf