Market Power

I'm Still Here

Yes, I am still here.  I've got family in town for the holidays and, before they came to town, my family and I went to visit my wife's family over the weekend.  Thus the light blogging.  My family is here until the end of the weekend, my kids have next week off from school, and I've got a paper that I need to keep plugging away on.  So I probably won't be writing much in this space until after next week.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all Market Power readers.

HT to Fraters Libertas for the picture.

Field Experiment on Gift-Giving

From the University of Chicago:

In studying how people respond to matching gifts, the scholars (John List of the U. of Chicago and Dean Karlan of Yale) discovered that whether the donation match was three dollars to one, two dollars to one, or one dollar to one, the rate and amount of giving was the same. The expectation that their donation would increase the total support to the organization was apparently enough to motivate donors, they found.

“Simply announcing the match money is available considerably increases the revenue per solicitation — by 19 percent,” List said. “In addition, the match offer significantly increases the probability that an individual donates — by 22 percent.”

...List and Karlan were able to test that assumption (that increasing matching amounts increases giving) with a field experiment conducted with the cooperation of a liberal non-profit organization that works on social and policy areas related to civil liberties. The group regularly sends out mailings requesting donations, and the two scholars were able to perform a field experiment with one of their mailings.

In their experiment, the organization sent a mailing to more than 50,000 people who had given to them in the past.  A control group, making up about a third of the group, received a mailing with no offer of a match.  The remainder was divided evenly into groups that received different matching offers, including one to one, two to one and three to one.

Here is the paper.  The italicized entries are mine.  I found this interesting:

Because the group is politically oriented, the scholars also wanted to see if the political environment of the donors’ communities had an impact on giving.  The people who lived in states where George Bush had won the 2004 presidential election apparently felt a greater threat to civil liberty causes because they gave more in response to the match, the scholars found.

Regardless of their age, education, or income, donors in red states were much more sensitive to the match than those in blue states, the study showed. List noted that  “much more work is necessary before we understand the exact mechanism at work in red and blue states, but the results of our study are consistent with other research in sociology, psychology, and economics that also shows people have a tendency to rally to support causes when they feel they are under some threat.”

The obvious question is if conservatives, libertarians, or other political (or non-political) groups behave differently.

On the First Day of Christmas

On the first day of Christmas my congressman gave to me, a "no" vote to stop the AMT (that's from page on of the local paper today.  Sorry, but I have no link yet):

On a 352-64 vote, the House on Wednesday approved a one-year fix of the Alternative Minimum Tax but didn't identify a method for offsetting the $50 million cost to the federal treasury - essentially adding the amount to the national debt.

How about cutting ethanol subsidies?

Congressman Tim Walz, DFL-Mankato, joined 63 other Democrats in opposing the bill.

My colleagues on both sides of the aisle caved into pressure from President Bush and wealthy special interests and passed a so-called middle class tax bill that mortgages our children's future for short term political gratification, Walz said in a written statement after the vote.  This is nothing more than a shell game that passes on a 'tax' in the form of increased debt to our children and grandchildren.

Thanks, Tim, for thinking of my children.  Are you available to babysit sometime?

Honey BBQ Sauce for Wings

1 part honey
2 parts BBQ sauce

I used Gates BBQ sauce.  It's vinegarry and spicy and mixed well with the honey.

Which is the Better Matchup?

Heh.

Tickets to see Missouri play Arkansas in the Cotton Bowl sold out less than 24 hours after they went on sale a few weeks ago, and online scalpers are fetching $150 to $500 per ticket for the Jan. 1 game in Dallas.

Randy Cohen, CEO of Ticket City.com, said the Cotton Bowl has been one of his company’s top five best-selling tickets.

"This is a monster game," said Cohen, whose Austin, Texas-based company buys season tickets from big venues and resells them over the Internet. "Missouri hasn’t been to a bowl of this magnitude in quite some time."

The Orange Bowl, meanwhile, is in much less demand. Tickets to the Jan. 7 game in Miami are still available on KU’s Web site. Online ticket vendors are selling seats for the game between Kansas and Virginia Tech at a fraction of their $125 face value.

Russ Lindmark, owner of Ticket Solutions in Overland Park, Kan., said Orange Bowl ticket sales have been "terrible" and the lack of interest in the game has caused prices to plummet to $29 each.

"The Kansas people just aren’t going," Lindmark said. "I think the Kansas people know that their team isn’t really all that good."

Computing Order

Mainframes:  intelligent design
Google Clouds:  spontaneous order.

End of the Semester Stuff: Price Gouging, North Korean Atrocities, and Steroids

Grading is done, but I have one more meeting to go to before the official end of the semester.  Blogging will be rather intermittent over the next several weeks.  I've got two papers I need to finish and send out for rejection review and I have at least one more that needs to get started.  And I've got lecture notes to type up for Sports Econ next semester.  Oh, did I add in I'll have family currently living in Puerto Rico coming up for a visit over the holidays?  That's just another reason to get out the HO scale trains and race cars.  I hope they didn't sell off their big fluffy jackets when they left Ohio of PR.  They'll need them in Minnesota - in spades.

Anyways, I wanted to leave you with a few excellent posts I've seen over the past couple of days just in case I don't get away from Christmas shopping and writing.

Bill Polley defends markets and so-called price-gougers.

Tom Kirkendall posts on the plight of a former North Korean prisoner.  Something I learned from reading a link in Tom's post:  up to 3 generations of a prisoner's family must be imprisoned as traitors.

Tom also posts on baseball's steroids problem.

Brian Goff posts on the same.

Not a Nerd

HT Stephen Karlson

Headline of the Week

You can't make this stuff up:

Eco-friendly kangaroo farts could help global warming: scientists

HT DOL.