Market Power

When it comes to tickets to LSU football, freshmen students get the scraps.  Upperclassmen and the public get the first crack, forcing freshmen to sometimes resort to scalping tickets to get entry to Tiger Stadium.  A Louisiana state representative is not a fan of the current system, calling it a “crime” that freshmen students pay as much as $300 for scalped tickets.

State Rep. Terry Brown has introduced a bill that would require the LSU Board of Supervisors to offer incoming freshmen tickets to all home games.

Story here.  To the extent that the Invariance Hypothesis Coase Theorem holds, this proposed change in property rights wouldn't put more freshman fannies in the seats at Tiger Stadium.  But it would put more cash in their pockets when they turn around and resell their tickets.

When are income taxes not passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices?  From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

And with jock taxes, cities and states can generate revenue without taxing their electorate. The Pittsburgh usage fee does not apply to any full-time city resident.

I think this is right.  Because player salaries are fixed with respect to attendance, sports economists argue that ticket prices don't depend on the salaries paid to athletes.  This is especially true of visiting player salaries.  If so, then these taxes won't get passed on to fans via ticket prices.

 

May you have clear skies and little/no light pollution where you live.  Folks in the northern part of the US may get a treat tonight.

The solar flare itself won't be responsible for the geomagnetic storm. Instead, it is a coronal mass ejection, or CME, a mass of plasma and charged particles the sun expelled immediately after the solar flare, that could interact with Earth's magnetosphere and cause the storm. Enhanced auroras may be visible as far south as New Jersey and Oregon late Saturday evening and into Sunday.

 

What can Skype reveal in interviews? University of Missouri athletic coaches are using Skype to recruit players.  There is no surprise there.  But athletic department administrators are using Skype to conduct interviews of coaches.  What are they looking at besides the various reactions of the interviewees?

Mary Austin, Missouri's senior associate athletic director for compliance who oversees golf and tennis, used Skype to whittle down the pool of candidates while hiring a head tennis coach two years ago.

Austin and a search committee interviewed 11 candidates through Skype and then hosted on-campus visits with three finalists. Schmid got the job, in part because of how she presented herself during the Skype interview.

Wearing a suit, Schmid sat behind an office desk with books and diplomas and such in the background. In the days leading up to the interview, she practiced Skyping with her mother, trying different outfits and backdrops.

"You've got to make sure you have a test run," Schmid said.

Others candidates weren't as presentable, Austin said. One man hadn't shaved in a few days, and another's dog was barking in the background. One woman had her unkempt living room as a backdrop.

"You could see all of her dirty clothes stacked up on one side of the picture. ... The attention to detail, that's what it points out," Austin said.

Academic recruitment committees could use Skype to screen applicants for professor positions.  In some ways, Skype > personal interviews because not only can you see the person, you can see them in a background of their choosing.  How much care did the applicants take to set up their backdrop?  That can reveal signals that may not be observable during on-campus interviews.

Old news:  dark matter.  In and groovy:  dark lightning.

Dark lightning appears sometimes to compete with normal lightning as a way for thunderstorms to vent the electrical energy that gets pent up inside their roiling interiors, Dwyer says. Unlike with regular lightning, though, people struck by dark lightning, most likely while flying in an airplane, would not get hurt. But according to Dwyer’s calculations, they might receive in an instant the maximum safe lifetime dose of ionizing radiation — the kind that wreaks the most havoc on the human body.

Raj Chetty, Harvard economist, wins John Bates Clark Medal.  

Mr. Chetty, who is 33 years old, has focused recently on three areas: education, retirement savings and equality of opportunity. Recently, he has been tapping immense data sets to examine how equality of opportunity, such as in early-childhood education, varies across the U.S.

Today in Pigovian Taxes:  "Maryland's Controversial 'Rain Tax'."

"Physics and green beer bottles."  Why does beer in green glasses smell skunky?  I knew the answer to this.  Then again, I've been brewing beer for almost 20 years.

You Have Two Cows - Updated

The old "you have two cows" meme has been updated, and nicely so.  An example:

French corporation:  You have two cows.  You go on strike, organize a riot, and block the roads because you want three cows.

Mizzou-Arky: An Emerging Rivalry?

Joe Walljasper on an emerging Mizzou-Arkansas rivalry.

I was a little skeptical of this idea of a manufactured rivalry. 

Games between MU and Arky in basketball (especially) and football, to me, have the makings of a natural rivalry.  A natural rivalry is one that fans of both sides buy into without a sales job from the football coach, basketball coach, athletic director etc.  It's one that the fans "feel" on the inside.  It's organic.  The schools' administrations can always try to "manufacture" a rivalry top down, but if the fans don't accept it in their hearts, it ain't no rivalry.  Knowhatimean, Bill McCartney?

I'd use an analogy of the price in a perfectly competitve market, or say something about emergent order, but that would be too econogeeky.  

A lot of little things over the past 20-30 years have happened in MU-Arky football and, especially, basketball games that makes fans think "I want to get back at that team for x" where x is some event that fans may care about.  x might be the 52 point thumping Arky gave Mizzou back in 1993 to christen their then-new Bud Walton arena.  x might be the obvious one with Mike Anderson.  x might be the beatdown the Chase-Daniel led near NFL-team crushed the supposedly superior Hogs in the 1998 Cotton Bowl, a team with some fine talent of its own.

A MU-Arky rivavlry would never have the history behind the MU-Kansas rivalry, a history that generated a hatred in many fans of both teams.  Say what you will about hate, but that hatred made that rivalry special    But on the other hand, MU-Arky doesn't have the feel of the manufactured rivalry between Nebraska and Colorado in the later stages of the old Big 8's days.  

To me, and I speak only for myself, it has the feeling of a natural rivalry.