Amazon had been concerned with Walmart's and Target's growing presence as online marketplaces. Now Sebastian Herrera at the WSJ reports that their focus has shifted to Temu and Shein. So far, Amazon's US market share is larger than the other four combined. But these newcomers (to the US) believe that this could change. Temu's number of active users is approaching Amazon's, but Temu's revenue per user is much lower. It is interesting how all of these firms are staking out differentiated products strategies. Walmart and Target leverage their brick & mortar stores, Shein focuses on fast fash ..read more

From "Diversity and Performance in Entrepreneurial Teams" (SSRN):  Among the randomly-assigned teams [of MBA students], greater diversity along the intersection of gender and race/ethnicity significantly reduced performance.  However, the negative effect of this diversity is alleviated ... [when teams can choose their teammates] ...teams with more female members perform substantially better when their faculty section leader was also female.  ..read more

A WSJ article by Alexandra Bruell reports that three years ago the Atlantic magazine ran a $20 million deficit which led to layoffs. A new boss, Nick Thompson, was tasked with turning this around. Along with editorial changes toward longer investigative pieces rather than breaking news, the Atlantic raised subscription prices 50%. How did he know to do this? Thompson’s team ran experiments to determine the best way to charge more without alienating new readers. It is offering fewer stories free and no longer discounting subscriptions. Last year, it raised prices for annual subscriptions to $8 ..read more

Economist: Four main factors, explain happiness:  Age: Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. ... . [Then as people lose] ... vitality, mental sharpness and looks, they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness. Gender: Women, by and large, are slightly happier than men. But they are also more susceptible to depression: a fifth to a quarter of women experience depression at some point in their lives, compared with around a tenth of men.  Personality: Neurotic people—those who are prone to guilt ..read more

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is considering mandating SawStop technology on future table saws. Ben Blatt at The Age does a good job of laying out the issues and providing some numbers. The technology to drop the blade out of harm's way within a few milliseconds is amazing (see video). My table saw is the scariest piece of equipment in this woodworker's shop.  Let's see if this mandate might be worth it. The article in The Age reports that table saws cause 4,300 amputations every year, more than thousands of other products combined. Almost all of these will be fingers. Max ..read more

WSJ :  The top 1% of earners in 2021 provided 45.8% of tax revenue;    the top 10% provided 75.8%;   the bottom 50% provided 2.3%.   The obvious justification for this kind of inequality is incentives.  If we pay people who create more wealth more, we get more wealth.    Claude.ai:   Denmark: The top 10% of income earners in Denmark pay around 28% of all Danish income tax revenue collected. However, Denmark has very high income tax rates across the board compared to the US, with even average earners paying around 36 ..read more

  Due to music streaming, many musicians can expect steady royalty streaming. The WSJ has a video that explains how this future income is increasingly being capitalized and securitized. This way, the artist has access to the cash now instead of waiting for the streams to materialize ..read more

The FTC asked a Washington court to split its monopolization case against Amazon (earlier blog post) in two: 1. to determine whether FTC has a monopoly (liability), and then 2. what to do about it (remedy). The FTC rightly believes that the liability phase of the trial will be relatively easy to win, but that the remedy phase will not.  If the FTC has to litigate both at once, a judge will ask whether the remedy is worse than the problem it is designed to fix.  The burden of answering it would fall on the FTC.   For example, suppose that the FTC thinks that the source of A ..read more

...because they are exempt from fuel economy standards: Because making light trucks held to lower environmental standards was more profitable than building small clean cars, automakers marketed big models, including suvs, enthusiastically. They portrayed them as quintessentially American, embodying freedom, strength and adventurousness. By 2002 light trucks made up a bigger share of light-duty vehicle sales than cars. After the price shock of the 1970s, by the 1990s petrol had become cheaper in America than in other rich countries—so the cost of running a big car did not deter buyers. Such ..read more

Progressive Insurance pioneered telematic monitoring devices to offer Pay-How-You-Drive (PHYD) insurance policies over a decade ago. Now State Farm, along with other insurance companies, is partnering with Whisker Labs to offer the Ting home monitoring system. These are WiFi-enabled sensors that plug into an outlet to detect potential electrical fires. Whisker Labs monitors these sensors in what they claim is the largest Internet of Things (IoT) network to monitor the grid. State Farm is offering these for free to its customers presumably because, once insured, customers provide too little ..read more