Le Guin
I learned that Ursula Le Guin passed away, earlier today. I am a bit surprised how much this news has affected me. Le Guin was one of the best writers that I had the pleasure of reading, first as a…
Amazon HQ2: Tournament with a twist
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…
Stickiness of Pricing: Prime Discrimination
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…
Review: A Full Life
A 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…
Review: Hit Makers
Derek 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…
A List of Links
As 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…
Sherlock Holmes and Uber
In 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…