Virtual Economies — new book from MIT Press on economics in games. The book will enable developers and designers to create and maintain successful virtual economies, introduce social scientists and policy makers to the power of virtual economies, and provide a useful guide to economic fundamentals for students in other disciplines.
The Wisdom of Smaller, Smarter Crowds — in domains in which some crowd members have demonstrably more skill than others, smart sub-crowds could possibly outperform the whole. The central question this work addresses is whether such smart subsets of a crowd can be identified a priori in a large-scale prediction contest that has substantial skill and luck components. (via David Pennock)
Larry and Sergey with Vinod (YouTube) — see transcription. I really liked Page’s point about scaling the number of things that companies do, and the constraints on such scaling.
