john_horton

9 ms·

31.
by john_horton 11y ago
Full disclosure: I worked at oDesk for 2 years as their staff economist and still consult with the company (I'm now a professor at NYU Stern). A few points on issues raise in this thread: (1) I can assure you---and I really should do s
32.
Trusting Uber (or any tech company) with Your Data(john-joseph-horton.com)
1 points by john_horton 12y ago|0 comments
33.
by john_horton 12y ago
If you're looking for a discussion of running economics-style experiments on MTurk (as well as some advice on keeping online experiments internally valid): http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=159120
34.
Does Airbnb hosting beggar your neighbor? (john-joseph-horton.com)
1 points by john_horton 12y ago|0 comments
35.
A Price Theory of Silicon Valley(papers.ssrn.com)
3 points by john_horton 12y ago|0 comments
36.
Perceptions of the Morality of Uber’s “Surge” Pricing(john-joseph-horton.com)
1 points by john_horton 13y ago|0 comments
37.
Job titles & wages on oDesk(onlinelabor.blogspot.com)
3 points by john_horton 13y ago|0 comments
38.
by john_horton 13y ago
That's correct - when the client makes a hire, she can decide whether or not to allow offline hours.
39.
Script for starting a new academic project that uses R, LaTeX & make(github.com)
2 points by john_horton 13y ago|0 comments
40.
by john_horton 14y ago
Maybe the fact that moment conditions are often first order conditions for some agent's optimization problem is why rationality was mentioned, but I'm just speculating.
41.
by john_horton 14y ago
well put. FYI - Here's a link to an interactive illustration of the deferred acceptance algorithm that I posted a few years back on HN: http://mathsite.math.berkeley.edu/smp/smp.html
42.
by john_horton 14y ago
Their work has nothing to do with central planning in the sense of committee deciding on production quotas---it's actually about how to allocate indivisible resources (school positions, kidneys, residency slots etc.) in situations where usi
43.
by john_horton 14y ago
The short story is that hand-curation does not seem to work at a very large scale, so we need to create tools for automated discovery (e.g., search, recommendations, controlled skill vocabulary etc.) and automated but credible signals of ab
44.
by john_horton 14y ago
Agreed about the 244% - apologies. I glossed over the relative part which is kind of important here. There's still been growth, but it hasn't been that dramatic.
45.
by john_horton 14y ago
Interesting article, but one quote from the sociologist was way off the mark: "The historical decline in self-employment and the concomitant rise and dominance of large oligarchic corporations (including chains and franchises) have created
46.
Indian blackouts & oDesk(onlinelabor.blogspot.com)
3 points by john_horton 14y ago|1 comments
47.
Digitization of the supply side of the labor market(onlinelabor.blogspot.com)
2 points by john_horton 14y ago|0 comments
48.
by john_horton 14y ago
A conceptually similar paper by another MIT economist looked at how the IP protection afforded to different genes at the time of sequencing affected follow-on research. Genens that were immediately in the public domain stimulated about abou
49.
by john_horton 14y ago
If anyone has any questions about the data itself, I'm happy to answer/elaborate.
50.
by john_horton 14y ago
There's an understandably human tendency to highlight our accomplishments and bury our failures, which can give inexperienced outsiders/novices in some field a warped perception of what's "normal," exacerbating their self-doubt. I think it'
51.
by john_horton 14y ago
There's a famous paper in economics that looks at the long-term labor market outcomes for people that were laid-off because of plant closings versus those were just laid-off: http://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jlabec/v9y1991i4p351-80.html The
52.
by john_horton 14y ago
If you were doing SEO/SEM writing or something like that, then maybe, but for these kinds of jobs, you can charge a premium if you know what you're doing & deliver value. Many employers are cheap, but fewer are stupid---they do want to
53.
by john_horton 14y ago
If you do a pretty targeted job search, there's a decent number of these kinds of jobs on oDesk (full disclosure, I work at oDesk). Machine learning: https://www.odesk.com/jobs?nbs=1#filter/?qs=machine-learning... Hadoop: https://www.o
54.
Resources for online social science(onlinelabor.blogspot.com)
1 points by john_horton 14y ago|0 comments
55.
The Innovation of StackOverflow(onlinelabor.blogspot.com)
9 points by john_horton 14y ago|4 comments
56.
by john_horton 14y ago
This sounds like a case where the problem of collective action would actually work in society's favor: a single vandal would bear the full cost of destroying the sensor (e.g., the risk of getting caught), but the "benefits" of the destroyed
57.
by john_horton 14y ago
I don't disagree with that - a bar chart that doesn't start at zero can be misleading. But for what he was trying to do---compare means---it would have been a perfectly fine choice to do a lineplot/ very thin bar plot and start the y-axes
58.
by john_horton 14y ago
Agree that 3D graphs are terrible, but it's a canard that y-axes always need to start at 0 and that doing anything else is somehow misleading. On this point, see http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/axes-of-evil/
59.
by john_horton 14y ago
Re: oDesk data - what do you want to know? I regular post data from oDesk on my own blog (I work at oDesk w/ these folks: https://www.odesk.com/info/l/research/ ): http://onlinelabor.blogspot.com/ . And there's the "oConomy": https://www
60.
Using Google Surveys to Estimate the Fairness of Coins(glittle.org)
4 points by john_horton 14y ago|1 comments

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