Book Prize Winner: 2 million!

The WINNER of the faaaaabulous prize is Andreas P, from Alexandria, VA!

He'll be receiving a copy of each of the following two books:

1.  Someguy and Grier THE LONG PROCESS OF DEVELOPMENT

2.  Munger and Munger CHOOSING IN GROUPS

Thanks to everyone who entered!

Spectacular KPC 2,000,000th visitor massacre!

People, the sublime mess that is KPC keeps on chuggin'.  Sail on o ship of state and all that.

To partially thank our loyal, wonderful, (likely damaged) readers, we are going to give away two new Cambridge Press books to our awesome, divine, god-like two millionth visitor.

We could "spread the wealth around" and mail a page to each of you but that just not how we roll.

The first book is Munger's "Choosing in groups" (which is joint with the EYM. I wonder how many second year PhD students have CUP books out?).

But wait, there's more!

Since I can't write anything over 25 pages long and have no children, I've gotten Mrs. Angus to toss in a copy of her new Cambridge book, "The long process of Development"

Hey, I just thought of a joke:

Q: What's long and hard on a country?

A: Development!

So keep visiting KPC for your chance at these faaaabulous prizes.

I am not making this up. We will track our 2,000,000th unique visitor and upon contacting them and getting their info, will hit them with this awesome prize package. All decisions will be made by Mungowitz and are final. KPC employees and their families are ineligible.

(Technical detail:  the tracking info includes location and most--except last field--of the IP address, so we KNOW who you are, just like the freakin' NSA!  So no scamming, please.  We know your city and IP, and that will be your ticket to books.  If #2m does not contact us, we'll go to #2m+1, and then #2m-1, until we get a winner!)

Thanks for tuning in and don't touch that dial.

Tullock Mentioned in ASR? Wow.

By the extraordinary G. Rossman, the world's last sensible sociologist.

 His article "Close, But No Cigar: The Bimodal Rewards to Prize-Seeking," actually by Gabriel Rossman and Oliver Schilkea. A link if it lasts. Gated link if it doesn't. Wow!  In the ASR.  Much respect.  The word "Tullock" in the ASR?  The force is strong in this one...

Abstract:

This article examines the economic effects of prizes with implications for the diversity of market positions, especially in cultural fields. Many prizes have three notable features that together yield an emergent reward structure: (1) consumers treat prizes as judgment devices when making purchase decisions, (2) prizes introduce sharp discontinuities between winners and also-rans, and (3) appealing to prize juries requires costly sacrifices of mass audience appeal. When all three conditions obtain, winning a prize is valuable, but seeking it is costly, so trying and failing yields the worst outcome—a logic we characterize as a Tullock lottery. We test the model with analyses of Oscar nominations and Hollywood films from 1985 through 2009. We create an innovative measure of prize-seeking, or “Oscar appeal,” on the basis of similarity to recent nominees in terms of such things as genre, plot keywords, and release date. We then show that Oscar appeal has no effect on profitability. However, this zero-order relationship conceals that returns to strong Oscar appeals are bimodal, with super-normal returns for nominees and large losses for snubs. We then argue that the effect of judgment devices on fields depends on how they structure and refract information.