The closer something is to you, the more you care about it and the more you know about it. I've called this the "Vanishing Point Theory of News" before, and for the last year or so I've been testing it on the economy.

My book is mostly about two prices--something and nothing--but at dinner in NYC with Jay Walker this week, he convinced me to include a discussion of a third price: less than nothing.

I had a great interview today with Google's economist-in-residence Hal Varian on the economics of free. He pointed me to a 2004 paper he wrote on the changing economics of content and copyright in a digital world.

Technology can be a powerful deflationary force. Thanks to Moore's Law (the remarkable ability of computer technology to double in power for the same price, or halve in price for the same power, every 18 months) if you want a 50 percent discount on an...

Economists use incentives to explain human behavior. In traditional economics these are mainly monetary incentives, but the expansion of the field to behavioral economics in the 1970s introduced other factors, such as...

For a recent speech to a travel company, we pulled together some data on the changing shape of travel due to low-cost carriers, online travel information and social-media driven word of mouth taking tourists beyond the usual top destinations. As in any...

This was one of those freaky moments when the future sneaks up and smacks you. I was on a plane earlier this week and took a break from work to watch the movie while they served dinner. It was Terminator Salvation, which once again tells us what...

A team at Wharton did some Long Tail analysis on the Netflix ratings data the company released for its Netflix Prize. Although I don’t agree with many of the conclusions in their paper (like some other academics, they got confused over definitions of...