Amazon’s HQ2 selection process has been described as a beauty contest, which misses the point. Amazon is definitely not going to pick a city based on popular opinion or consensus. An excellent theoretical framework to think about Amazon’s choice process for HQ2 is the idea of Innovation Tournaments. A good resource to learn more is the wonderful book Innovation Tournaments by my Wharton colleagues Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich, which I highly recommend. Innovation tournament typically involves several contestants going through a series of rounds, as pictured above (under a selection-criterion and pre-announced rules), until a “winner” is chosen. American Idol is a TV-show that typified this idea. Innovation tournaments are a genuinely great method to brainstorm and generate new…
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In my earlier post on the Brief History of Amazon Prime, I had mentioned about the stickiness of Amazon Annual Prime Pricing. An issue with scaling revenues this way is stickiness of prices. It took a whole nine years for Amazon to go from $79 to a more profitable fee of $99. (I thought the fees would be raised to $108 at $9 a month – closer to NetFlix rates – but the fees were stickier than I had thought). Prime subscription prices vary quite a bit geographically around the world. For instance, the annual subscription is $99 in the U.S., £99 in the U.K. (equivalent to USD 115), $22 in Italy, and about $8 in India. However, within certain geography…
Leave a CommentA Full Life: Reflections at Ninety A successful presidency may be a function of steadfastness, leadership, decency and intellectual acuity, but it is also a resultant of happy accidents of cosmic confluence and contemporary affections of the citizenry. Presidential historians do not rate Carter’s presidency very highly. President Carter is a living testament that being a decent human being is not sufficient to be a successful president. In his book, President Carter reflects on his life at 90, looking back at his idyllic childhood in rural Georgia, his entry into politics, his life in submarines, and finally evaluates his presidential tasks completed and incomplete. Some Notes: President Carter remembers his house being a Sears Roebuck catalog house. In these days…
Leave a CommentDerek Thompson’s writing is always enjoyable.1 In his Hit Makers, Thompson looks at two main questions: 1. What is the secret to making products that people like? 2. Why do some products fail in the marketplaces while similar ideas catch on and become massive hits? To address the first one, he shows that many of the viral hits have some strong shared features (timely exposure, MAYA rule2– most advanced yet acceptable designs, refrain and repetition for music, helpful economics, network effects, and the force of storytelling). But these features are, as Thompson himself argues, not exactly some “secret sauce”. I hope that the readers are not frustrated by the eventual answer to Why question: much of virality is due to…
Leave a CommentAs 2017 has concluded, time to take stock. Here is the list of most read posts on the OWL Blog. 2017 Book Recommendations Books read in 2017 Where have all the Retail jobs gone? Death by a Single Cut? Roaming Workforce: A Review of Nomadland Dynamic Pricing of Parking Spots This is just from raw data – I am omitting recency bias, about page, etc.
Leave a CommentIn late December 2017, continuing its string of legal setbacks, Uber lost a case in the European Court of Justice which ruled that Uber is a taxi company. Specifically, the courts rule that a company whose service is “to connect, by means of a smartphone application and for remuneration, non-professional drivers using their own vehicle with persons who wish to make urban journeys” must be considered “a service in the field of transport.” The news coverage of the case indicate that the ruling only impacts four markets (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Romania), where Uber is yet to be regulated under the local or national laws. In fact, Uber is already regulated like a taxi company in many European nations. Proponents of…
Leave a CommentHighlighting five books that I loved reading in 2017. These are not necessarily books that were published in 2017. By design, and by inhibitions imposed by the relative paucity of my prior readings, I tend to read books after a time lag. On the flip side, I would like to think that my reading is not strongly influenced by the news cycle. The time lag also provides opportunities to discover older, well-regarded books. In the recommendation below, I did not include books I read again (e.g. Tolkien and Marcus Aurelius) and also some books that I thoroughly enjoyed (e.g., a new translation of Crime and Punishment by Pevear and Volokhonsky). More or less, I have tried to curate books based…
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