"Ah, poor Google.  So full of really smart people, so detached from reality.  I say this with great respect for my many friends and colleagues who work there.  Your fundamental inhumanity is your tragic flaw, and the thing that made you so good providing search is going to doom you in the social space."

"Here is an essay version of my class notes from Class 6 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are my own. Credit for good stuff is Peter’s entirely. This class was kind of a crash course in VC financing."

The 16th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD) is pleased to organize a data mining competition.

"Hence, at last, the supreme irony. Those who claim most-fervent dedication to the guiding principle of our Enlightenment: competition, reciprocal accountability and enterprise -- our neighbors who call themselves conservative or libertarian -- have been talked into conflating that principle with something entirely different. Idolatry of private wealth, sacred and limitless. A dogmatic-religious devotion that reaches its culmination in the hypnotic cantos of Ayn Rand."

"Women are under-represented in top management positions on both sides of the Atlantic. The academic literature suggests a number of explanations for this underrepresentation, including self-selection, investment in family and child bearing, lower female human capital investment, or gender discrimination. Some countries have responded by setting minimum quotas for female managers.

A new strand of research considers another hypothesis – that the sexes perform differently under competitive pressures, even if these differences do not exist in non-competitive settings. "

Changemakers® is a community of action where we all collaborate on solutions. We know we have the power to solve the world’s most pressing social problems. We’re already doing it, one project, one idea at a time.

How do we do it? We talk about the issues, share stories and mentor, advise, and encourage each other in group forums, even engage in friendly competition. We form surprising connections and unexpected partnerships across the globe that turn the old ways of problem solving upside down. We try things that have never been tried before.

Competition, therefore, is not the crux of the problem. The crux of the problem is profit-seeking and power-seeking. Without these elements, competition ensures that the workers act in the direction of general welfare (the so-called “invisible hand”). But when they are not removed, they ensure that competition steers economic activity towards those avenues which bring the most money and power in, regardless of them being peaceful or coercive, honest or dishonest. And the bigger the economic agents, or the bigger the outside sources of money and power, the less incentive they have to be peaceful and honest.

Why Do Bankers Make So Much Money?
A tenet of economics is that in competitive markets there are no economic rents. That is, people get fairly paid for their efforts, their capital input, and for bearing risk. They are not paid any more than is necessary as an incentive for production. In trying to understand the reason for the huge pay scale within the finance industry, we can either try to justify the pay level as being a fair one in terms of the competitive market place, or ask in what ways the financial industry deviates from the competitive economic model in order to allow economic rents.

Decades of outsourcing manufacturing has left U.S. industry without the means to invent the next generation of high-tech products that are key to rebuilding its economy.

The present analysis introduces the N-Effect - the discovery that increasing the number of competitors (N) can decrease competitive motivation. Studies 1a-b found evidence that average test scores (e.g., SAT scores) fall as the average number of test-takers at test-taking venues increases. Study 2 found that individuals trying to finish an easy quiz among the top 20 percent in terms of speed finished significantly faster if they believed they were competing in a pool of 10 versus 100 other people. Using a social comparison orientation (SCO) scale, Study 3 showed the N-Effect occurs strongly among those high in SCO and weakly among those low in SCO. Study 4 directly linked the N-Effect to social comparison, ruling out the "ratio-bias" and finding that social comparison becomes less important as N increases. Finally, Study 5 found the N-Effect is mediated by social comparison. Limitations, future directions, and implications are discussed.

Coexistence of cooperators and defectors is common in nature, yet the evolutionary origin of such social diversification is unclear. Many models have been studied on the basis of the assumption that benefits of cooperative acts only accrue to others. Here, we analyze the continuous snowdrift game, in which cooperative investments are costly but yield benefits to others as well as to the cooperator. Adaptive dynamics of investment levels often result in evolutionary diversification from initially uniform populations to a stable state in which cooperators making large investments coexist with defectors who invest very little. Thus, when individuals benefit from their own actions, large asymmetries in cooperative investments can evolve.