From: Ian Ayres
[ian.ayres@stickk.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2008 8:40
AM
To: 'Ian Ayres'
Subject: more Ayres spam
Dear Friends,
The big news is that I’ve helped to create a new company, www.stickK.com, which has just launched. StickK is a free service that offers commitment bonds to help you stick to your goals. You can choose your goal, your stakes and even your referee. For example, you could put $100 at risk each week and promise to lose some weight. If you keep your commitment, you get your money back, if you don’t it goes to charity (or someone that you designate).
Within the next hour you should receive an invitation from StickK with a special link.
Commitment bonds have helped me live a happier life in 2007. I committed to exercise more (and for the first time can do 10 pull ups). I committed to read more (and have had the pleasure of reading more than 7000 novel pages). But most importantly, I committed to lose some weight and keep it off. I put $500 at risk a week and you can see the results in the following graph:
The upper blue line shows my “Goal Weight”, the weight that I can’t exceed without losing money. The red-line is my daily weight. For the first time in several attempts, I’ve stopped the yo-yoing. So far, I’ve lost the weight and it hasn’t cost me a penny.
I have hopes that StickK will be an engine for finding out what kind of incentives work the best and for whom.
But I’m still keeping my day job. Here are links to various writings.
In this public radio
commentary for Marketplace, I worry about a troubling aspect of CRM – customer
relationship management – which I characterize as a kind of corporate
Zoloft. Sometimes firms have an incentive to discriminate against their
happiest customers. Now,
the customer's always managed (Oct. 8, 2007) (Audio)
Here’s a Forbes column (coauthored
with Barry Nalebuff) on a new type of currency: The
New Green
In this article in the Economist’s
Voice, I ask David Stern to release ref data so give fan’s more reason to trust
the NBA’s integrity. It’s called “Give
Freakonomics A Chance.”
I’ve also started to post from
time to time on the New York Times Freakonomics blog. Here are some
recent posts:
December
11,
2007
11:34 am
Why
Don’t Sports Teams Use Randomization?
November
21,
2007
12:04 pm
EULA
Wars: The Customer Is Always Right … to Lodge a Protest
November
12,
2007
11:34 am
Poker Bots on the
Rise:
Ian Ayres is an economist and
lawyer at Yale and the author of Super Crunchers, which we excerpted here. He
has agreed to write occasional guest posts on our blog, which delights us,
since he has a lot of compelling interests and insights.
Ian is not the only notable guest blogger who will turn up on […]
And there is tons of stuff related to the recent publication of
Super
Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way to Be Smart (Bantam 2007). Which made
it’s way on to both the New York Times and Wall St. Journal Business Best
Seller lists.
Here’s an hour long YouTube video Super Crunchers talk that I gave at Google (a very cool place):
Here is an hour long video from a talk I gave at Microsoft: Launch Presentation
Here’s an audio of a London School of Economics lecture:
Why
Thinking-By-Numbers is the New Way to be Smart
Speaker(s): Professor
Ian Ayres
Chair: Professor
Chrisanthi Avgerou
This event was recorded on
13 Sept 2007 in the Old Theatre, Old Building
Available as:
mp3
(19 mb; approx 96 minutes)
Here’s an excerpt that made the
cover of the Financial Times Sunday Magazine: How
Computers Routed the Experts, Financial Times (August 31, 2007).
EconTalk Podcast: Ayres on Super Crunchers and the Power of Data
October
22, 2007, Featuring Ian Ayres
|
|
WNYC - The Leonard
Lopate Show: Super Crunchers (September 05, 2007)
|
www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/episodes/2007/09/05
- 32k - Cached
– Similar
pages - Note
this |
This Week in Science -
The Kickass Science Podcast
|
Interview w/ Ian Ayres, Author of Super Crunchers ... |
And last but not least are some
more academic pieces:
This article talks about the
possibility of using tradable patent rights and renewal feeds to try to weed
the patent thicket: Tradable
Patent Rights: A New Approach to Innovation, Stanford Law Review
(forthcoming 2008) (with Gideon Parchomovsky).
This article argues that “price gouging is not a business
justification.” It grows out of consulting I did on several class action
disparate impact suits against major auto lenders. Market
Power and Inequality: A Competitive Conduct Standard for Assessing When
Disparate Impacts are Justified, 95
California Law Review 669 (2007).
This publication is nearest and dearest to my heart (check out the pictures and bios of Henry and Anna on the last page): Seeing Significance: Is the 95% Probability Range Easier to Perceive?, 20 CHANCE 11 (Winter 2007) (with Antonia Ayres-Brown & Henry Ayres-Brown).
I wish you all a resolute 2008.
Ian
Ayres
Co-Founder stickK.com LLC
19
Whitney Ave.
New
Haven, CT 06510
866.578.4255 (o), 866.578.4255 (f), 203.415.5587 (c)
ian.ayres@stickK.com
www.stickK.com (stickK to your goals)
www.ianayres.com (downloads and audio
clips)