Akasic

It’s time to show you the starlight. Watch the new video for “California Kids.”

North America, pre-order the S/T album (out April 1st) on iTunes for only $7.99 and get “California Kids” instantly - the song will be available internationally by midnight local time. 

As rapturous as the band's second album feels in its catchiest moments, it's all in service to songs that touch on the dueling bittersweet experiences of love.

Brace yourself winter storm Jonas is coming

Missed all the big announcements last night? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered:

- New self titled album out April 1st
- New song “King of the World” out now. Listen to it on VEVO or on Spotify, and get the song instantly when you pre-order the album on Apple Music or Amazon. (Ex-North America the song will be up by midnight local time; international digital pre-order coming soon)
- CD and vinyl bundles are available worldwide in our webstore
- We’re playing a few album release shows this March & April in Brooklyn, London, Manchester, and Amsterdam (info below)
- Hitting 40+ cities across North America on the Weezer and Panic! At The Disco Summer Tour 2016 w/ special guest Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness (pre-sale info & dates below)

ALBUM RELEASE SHOWS

March 30 - Brooklyn, NY @ Warsaw (on sale today at 12pm EST)
April 03 - Manchester, UK @ Academy One (on sale 1/22 at 9am GMT)
April 05 - London, UK @ O2 Brixton Academy (on sale 1/22 at 9am GMT)
April 08 - Amsterdam, NL @ Heineken Music Hall (on sale 1/18 at 10am CET)

WEEZER & PANIC! AT THE DISCO SUMMER TOUR 2016
w/ special guest Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness

Pre-sale starts 1/19 at 10am local time. Sign up to the mailing list before 1/18 in order to get the pre-sale code. General on sale starts Friday 1/22 at 10am local.

June 10 - The Woodlands, TX @ Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion
June 11 - Corpus Christi, TX @ Concrete Street Amphitheater*
June 12 - New Orleans, LA @ Bold Sphere Music at Champions Square
June 14 - Miami, FL @ Bayfront Park Amphitheater
June 15 - Tampa, FL @ Midflorida Credit Union Amphitheater
June 16 - Atlanta, GA @ Lakewood Amphitheatre
June 19 - Daniel Island, SC @ Volvo Cars Stadium
June 20 - Charlotte, NC @ PNC Music Pavilion
June 21 - Raleigh, NC @ Walnut Creek Amphitheater
June 22 - Virginia Beach, VA @ Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater
June 24 - Bristow, VA @ Jiffy Lube Live
June 25 - Canandaigua, NY @ Constellation Brands – Marvin Sands PAC
June 26 - Scranton, PA @ Pavilion at Montage Mountain
June 28 - Gilford, NH @ Bank of New Hampshire Pavilion at Meadowbrook
June 30 - Wantagh, NY @ Nikon at Jones Beach Theater
July 01 - Mansfield, MA @ Xfinity Center
July 02 - Holmdel, NJ @ PNC Bank Arts Center
July 05 - Camden, NJ @ BB&T Pavilion
July 06 - Toronto, ON @ Molson Canadian Amphitheatre
July 08 - Clarkston, MI @ DTE Energy Music Theatre
July 09 - Milwaukee, WI @ Summerfest - Marcus Amphitheater
July 10 - Tinley Park, IL @ Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre
July 12 - Noblesville, IN @ Klipsch Music Center
July 13 - Nashville, TN @ Ascend Amphitheater
July 15 - Dallas, TX @ Gexa Energy Pavilion
July 16 - Oklahoma City, OK @ Zoo Amphitheater*
July 17 - Rogers, AR @ Walmart Arkansas Music Pavilion
July 19 - Maryland Heights, MO @ Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre
July 20 - Kansas City, MO @ Starlight Theatre
July 22 - Brandon, SD @ Badlands Motor Speedway*
July 23 - Council Bluffs, IA @ Harrah’s Hotel & Casino Council Bluffs - Stir Cove*
July 24 - Englewood, CO @ Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre
July 26 - Salt Lake City, UT @ USANA Amphitheatre
July 28 - Burnaby, BC @ Festival Lawn at Deer Lake Park
July 29 - Redmond, WA @ Marymoor Park
July 30 - Troutdale, OR @ Edgefield
July 31 - Mountain View, CA @ Shoreline Amphitheatre*
August 02 - Phoenix, AZ @ AK-Chin Pavilion
August 03 - Chula Vista, CA @ Sleep Train Amphitheatre*
August 05 - Santa Barbara, CA @ Santa Barbara Bowl
August 06 - Irvine, CA @ Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre

* Weezer and Panic! At The Disco only

“Do You Wanna Get High?” sounds like it’s a really yucky and intentionally uncomfortable portrayal of the addict’s life. There’s nothing sexy, fun or funny about it, and it’s cruising along doing its thing, when Whoa Hey what is this sweet little bridge thing? Suddenly the song is sunny and sweet and in my mind, creatively this is when the high kicks in - suddenly everything is lovely and dreamy (and not the gritty reality of the rest of the song).

Rivers Cuomo  

Thanks to Zane for premiering the song earlier on Beats 1! Listen to “Do You Wanna Get High?” above. It’ll be up on Apple Music, Spotify, etc. starting at midnight local time around the world.  

New single “Thank God For Girls” out now. 

Our newest MRUniversity online course in economics is now starting, Principles of Microeconomics! Tyler and I have created what we think is our most engaging course yet — featuring high production quality videos filled with great examples to illustrate key concepts.

We’ll cover all of the important topics in microeconomics, such as competition, monopoly, price discrimination, externalities, public goods and more. There are practice questions along the way to test your knowledge, and don’t hesitate to post your questions on each video page.

Check out our video introducing the course and economics more generally. We begin with a great story about incentives!

American and US Airways will combine frequent flyer programs in a few months. In preparation for that, they’ve made it possible for you to link your AAdvantage and Dividend Miles accounts so that when the programs combine you can be sure all of your miles go to the right place.

This is all about helping American AAdvantage ensure the right accounts get linked, so there’s a smooth transition when the AAdvantage and Dividend Miles programs combine in the second quarter of the year.

• There are no bonus miles for doing this (as Delta/Northwest offered).
  
• You cannot move your miles back and forth between accounts (which America West/US Airways, Delta/Northwest, and United/Continental allowed).
  
• Linking accounts does not benefit elite status at this time.

You want to do this so that you’re sure your elite status, status miles, and redeemable miles all combine smoothly. For the most part they’ll do a pretty good job of it even if you don’t, but you have an incentive to make the process as easy as possible so you aren’t tracking down missing miles and missing accounts.

Here’s how to link your accounts…

The American Website

When you log into your AAdvantage account at aa.com, you’re confronted with a popup offering for you to link a US Airways account. I find that interesting, it’s certainly a great way to put this in front of people, but I’d bet that fewer than half of AAdvantage members are also Dividend Miles members. This may be confusing to those people.

I entered my US Airways number — a legacy US Airways account from before the America West merger — and the system is smart enough to add the requisite zeros prior to my number to make it match the current account number structure.

(Current US Airways account numbers are 11 digits, like the old America West system, since when US Airways and America West merged they went with the – in my view – inferior but cheaper America West architecture for managing frequent flyer accounts.)

I got instant confirmation that my accounts linked.

You get confirmation when looking at your AAdvantage account as well.

The US Airways Website

When you log into your account you get this popup offer to combine your accounts. You’ve already logged into your US Airways account. Now you just need to enter your AAdvantage number.

On my first attempt, I failed. The email addresses for the two accounts did not match.

If you don’t match right away when you get the popup, it is still an option to do it when you go to ‘My Account’

Success!

Incidentally one account had a middle name and the other account didn’t but that didn’t cause the problem. I changed only the email address, thinking I would check one factor at a time to see what was necessary for linking, and it worked.

Here’s what then shows up under ‘My Account’ when accounts have been linked.

Email Confirmations

When you link accounts, you’ll receive an email from both US Airways and American.

So Should You Do This Now, or Wait?

I do wish that American and US Airways would offer bonus points for doing this, and some will hold out hoping that they can pick up 500 miles for doing this if they wait… although American has said that they’re not offering bonuses, just the option to do this.

I think it’s worth doing, and doing early enough to see if there’s any problem getting accounts to match. I’ve done it for two accounts already, one had the slight problem of email accounts that were different was easily enough fixed. But I’d rather know up front if there are any problems so I can get them sorted before the programs actually merge.

In the end this is a minor process, there’s no huge benefit to doing it now versus waiting until March. I’d rather do it earlier and tick the box, others will wait in hopes that the airlines change their minds and give a bonus for the activity.

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The post Here’s How to Link Your American and US Airways Frequent Flyer Accounts appeared first on View from the Wing.

After waking to a distant tapping sound, Gary and Elaine ran downstairs just in time to witness their Christmas tree hatching.

Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward cover pop standards with the timeless impeccability for which they're known. Once again, Ward hovers mostly in the background, leaving Deschanel to steal the playful show.

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For years, the ASC warned that gender quota advocates would insist on the enforcement of Title IX’s Three Part Test in high school sports. Unfortunately, that prediction has recently become fact.

Now our warning is this: Watch out collegiate club and intramural sports. You are next!

According to a news story posted last week by the National Intramural-Recreational Sports Association, a working group there has written ‘revised gender equity guidelines’ for Title IX compliance for collegiate club and intramural sports.

The working document, “Toward the Development of National Intramural and Club Sport Gender Equity Guidelines,” has yet to be published, though according to Dr. Jacqueline McDowell of George Mason University, a select group of NIRSA’s members as well as the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights have already received an advanced copy of the document.

Dr. McDowell has posted a YouTube video where she discusses their proposals.
At 15:28 in the audio Dr. McDowell states, “the substantial proportionality test, it can be used for intramural sport…”

Guideline recommendations such as these made by NIRSA often precede actual policy changes. There’s more than enough detail here to worry us that the same sort of gender quotas and spending controls that we’ve seen applied to college varsity sports will someday be used to regulate club and intramural teams.

In a way, the threat here is far more significant in the total numbers of athletes who could be impacted. A 2008 New York Times article by Bill Pennington said that while the NCAA governs about 430,000 athletes, more than 2 million student athletes compete in club sports.

We have witnessed significant growth of intercollegiate club leagues in men’s lacrosse, swimming, volleyball, and wrestling, among others. These collegiate club leagues have grown in response to the reduction of playing opportunities for males at the varsity level caused by the cutting and capping of teams in order to comply with the gender quota.

NIRSA plans to unveil the new guidelines to the public at their conference in Texas in 2015.

A theory prize!  A rigor prize!  I would say it is about principal-agent theory and the increasing mathematization of formal propositions as a way of understanding economics.  He has been a leading figure in formalizing propositions in many distinct areas of microeconomics, most of all industrial organization but also finance and financial regulation and behavioral economics and even some public choice too.  He is a broader economist than many of his fans realize.

Tirole is a Frenchman, he teaches at Toulouse, and his key papers start in the 1980s.  In industrial organization, you can think of him as extending the earlier work of Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson with regard to opportunism and recontracting, but applying more sophisticated and more mathematical forms of game theory.  Tirole also has been a central figure in procurement theory and optimal contracts when there is asymmetric information about costs.  The idea of mechanism design runs throughout his papers in many different guises.  Many of his papers show “it’s complicated,” rather than presenting easily summarizable, intuitive solutions which make for good blog posts.  That is one reason why his ideas do not show up so often in blogs and the popular press, but they nonetheless have been extremely influential in the economics profession.  He has shown a remarkable breadth and depth over the course of the last thirty or so years.

His possible pick had been heralded for some numbers of years now, this award should not be considered a surprise at all.  You will note that the Swedes mention Jean-Jacques Laffont, who died a decade ago, and who co-authored many of the key papers in this area with Tirole.  Such a mention is considered a nod in the direction of implying that Laffont, had he lived, would have shared in the prize.

Here is Tirole’s home page.  Here is Tirole on Wikipedia.  Here is a short biography.  Here is Tirole on scholar.google.com.  Here is the press release.  Here is background from the Swedes.  Here is the 54-page document on why he won, one of the best places to start.  Here is the Twitter commentary.

One idea of Tirole’s I use frequently has to do with renegotiability.  Let’s say a regulator and a monopolist agree to a scheme of regulation and provision, creating some surplus for both parties.  As time passes, will each side of that bargain stick with the original agreement?  A simple example here is the defense contractor.  After a procurement contract is written, sometimes the supplier has the incentive to conduct a hold-up, to report that costs are higher than expected, and to ask for more money in return for timely fulfillment of the contract.  Of course this is a contract breach, but if no other supplier can step in and do the job, it may be optimal for the government to give in to these demands to some degree.  The question then is: how should the contract best be designed in advance, so as to prevent this problem from popping up later on?  Or should the renegotiation simply be allowed?  Anyone wishing to tackle these questions likely would start with the papers of Tirole on this topic.  For one thing, these papers help explain why a second-best optimal contract may offer some rents to agents and appear to give the agent “too good a deal.”

Some of his key papers focus on asymmetric information about costs.  Say a firm knows its costs and the regulator can only guess.  Ideally the regulator would likely to make the firm price at marginal cost, but the firm will pretend marginal cost is higher than it really is.  The regulator and the firm thus play a game.  Tirole figured out with rigor which principles govern how this game works and what a second-best regulatory solution might look like.  With Laffont, here is his key paper in that area.  David Baron made contributions to this area as well.  Again, there is a potential argument for an “agent rent,” to limit the incentive of the agent to lie too much about costs, for fear of losing that rent if the cooperative relationship breaks down.

Tirole, writing sometimes with Rey, wrote some important papers on vertical agreements and how they can be used to extend market power, for instance when can buying up parts of a supply chain help extend monopoly power?  His paper with Oliver Hart figures out some of the conditions under which vertical acquisitions can help foreclose a market.  With Rey, Tirole surveys the literature on vertical relations and foreclosure.

This early 1984 paper, with Drew Fudenberg, laid out the conditions when firms should overinvest in capacity to deter competitive entry, or when firms should instead look “lean and mean” for entry deterrence.  The underlying analysis has shaped many a business school discussion.

I am a fan of this 1996 paper on how we can think of firms as credible ways of carrying reputations in a collective sense.  For instance the existence of a firm called “Google” transmits real information about the qualities of the people you deal with when you are transacting with members of the Google firm.  This was an important addition to the usual Coasean vision of thinking of a firm in terms of economizing transaction costs.

He has written some key papers on financial intermediation, collateral, and the agency problems associated with lending, here is one well-cited paper by him and Holmstrom. Here is a non-gated version (pdf).  A key argument is that a decline in the value of the collateral in a lending relationship can lower efficiency and also output, and this can help explain some features of business cycles.  This 1997 paper was well ahead of its time and it remains one of Tirole’s most widely cited works.  Arguably it is relevant for recent financial crises.

He has a 1994 book with Mathias Dewatripont on the prudential regulation of banks and how to apply the proper incentives to make sure banks do not take too much risk at public expense.  Obviously this also has since become a much more important topic.  How many of you know his 1996 paper with Rochet on “Interbank Lending and Systemic Risk“?  They show the contradictions which can plague a “too big to fail” policy and the attempts of central banks to maintain a “creative ambiguity” about what kinds of bailouts will occur, using rigorous game theory of course.

With Rochet, he has a well-known paper on platform competition, laying out the basics of how these “two-sided” markets work.  Think of internet or payment portals which must get both sides of the market on board.  What are the efficiency properties of such markets and what are the game-theoretic issues?  In this setting, how do for-profits compare to non-profits?  Competition to monopoly?  Rochet and Tirole laid out some of the basics here, here is their survey piece on the field as a whole.  Alex’s post above has much more on these points, and Joshua Gans covers this area too, here is Vox.

In public choice economics, he and Laffont have an important paper on when regulatory capture is actually likely to occur.  I have yet to see the insights of this paper incorporated into the rest of the literature adequately.  His paper on the internal organization of government considers the relative appropriateness of high- vs. low-powered incentives as applied to government employees, among other matters.  His 1999 paper with Mathias Dewatripont, “Advocates,” shows in game-theoretic terms why something like the Anglo-American system of competing lawyers might make sense as the best way of discovering information and adjudicating the truth.  This paper shows how career concerns affect bureaucratic incentives and what is the optimal degree of specialization within a government bureaucracy.

He has thought very deeply about the nature of liquidity and what is the optimal degree of liquidity in a securities market.  There can be some side benefits to illiquidity, namely that it forces parties to stay committed to an economic relationship.  This must be weighed against the more obvious benefits of liquidity, which include having better benchmarks for measuring managerial performance, namely stock price (see this paper with Holmstrom).  This kind of analysis can be applied to the question of whether the shares of a firm should stay privately traded or be put on a public exchange.  This 1998 paper, with Holmstrom, is a key forerunner of the current view that the global economy does not have enough in the way of safe assets.

Here is his paper on vertical structure and collusion in bureaucracies (pdf).  Here is his very useful survey article, with Holmstrom, on the theory of the firm.

His textbook on Industrial Organization is a model of clarity and remains a landmark in the field, even though it came out almost thirty years ago.

He has written a book on telecommunications regulation (with Laffont) although I have never read that material.

In finance he wrote this key 1985 paper, deriving the conditions under which you can have an asset bubble in a market with rational expectations.  The problem of course is that the price of the asset tends to keep rising, relative to the size of the economy as a whole, and eventually it becomes impossible to keep on buying the asset.  This has to mean an eventual crash, unless the growth rate of the economy exceeds the general rate of return on assets.  This paper helped us think through some issues which recently have resurfaced with the work of Thomas Piketty.  His earlier 1982 paper on speculation is also relevant to this topic.  Most economists think of Tirole as game theory, finance, and industrial organization, but his contributions to finance are significant as well.

Just to show his breadth, here is his paper with Roland Benabou on incentives and when they undermine the intrinsic desire to do a good job.  For instance if you pay kids to get good grades, will that backfire and kill off their own reasons for wanting to do well?  Alex covers that paper in more detail.  This other paper with Benabou, “Self-Confidence and Personal Motivation,” is a great deal of fun.  It analyzes the benefits of overconfidence, namely greater motivation, and shows how to weigh those benefits against the possible costs, namely making more mistakes.  It shows Tirole dipping a foot into the waters of behavioral economics and again reflects his versatility in terms of fields.  I like this sentence from the abstract: “On the supply side, we develop a model of self-deception through endogenous memory that reconciles the motivated and rational features of human cognition.”  Again with Benabou, here is his paper on willpower and personal rules, very much in the vein of Thomas Schelling.

Here is Tirole on intellectual property and health in developing countries, with plenty on policy.

It’s an excellent and well-deserved pick.  One point is that some other economists, such as Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmstrom, may be disappointed they were not joint picks, this would have been the time to give them the prize too, so it seems their chances have gone down.

Overall I think of Tirole as in the tradition of French theorists starting with Cournot in 1838 (!) and Jules Dupuit in the 1840s, economics coming from a perspective with lots of math and maybe even some engineering.  I don’t know anything specific about his politics, but to my eye he reads very much like a French technocrat in terms of approach and orientation.

Jean Tirole is renowned as an excellent teacher and a very nice person.

The followers of the American Sports Council (ASC) will recall that we’ve been warning for years that gender quota activists were setting their sights on applying Title IX’s proportionality rule to high school sports. Now, with a recent federal court ruling, that day has come.

In a September 19, 2014 decision, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the district court judgment in the case Ollier v. Sweetwater Union High School District.

From the decision:

“The Government’s position rejects Sweetwater’s argument that Title IX should be applied differently to high schools than to colleges, as well as the idea that the district court’s “substantial proportionality” evaluation was flawed.⁶ We agree with the Government that the three-part test applies to a high school.

This is suggested by the Government’s regulations, See 34 C.F.R. § 106.41(a) (disallowing sex discrimination “in any interscholastic, intercollegiate, club or intramural athletics”), and, accordingly, apply the three-part “effective accommodation” test here. Although this regulation does not explicitly refer to high schools, it does not distinguish between high schools and other types of interscholastic, club or intramural athletics. We give Chevron deference to this regulation. See note 5, supra. See also McCormick ex rel. McCormick v. School Dist. of Mamaroneck, 370 F.3d 275, 300 (2d Cir. 2004) (applying three-part test to high school districts); Horner v. Ky. High Sch. Athletic Ass’n, 43 F.3d 265, 272–75 (6th Cir. 1994) (same).”

Back in 2011, the ASC sued the Department of Education to prevent the use of strict proportionality in Title IX at the high school level because it violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. In 2012, that complaint was dismissed, not on the merits, but based on the court’s position that since the ASC did not suffer any injury due to the Three-Part Test’s application to high school sports, that it did not have standing to sue.

At the time, Joshua Thompson of the Pacific Legal Foundation had this to say about the decision and its implications:

On its face, the Three-Part applies to intercollegiate athletics. Indeed, its actual title is, “A Policy Interpretation: Title IX and Intercollegiate Athletics.” It requires that colleges engage in sex-balancing by requiring institutions to have a proportional representation of male and female athletes at each school. While this alone is constitutionally troubling, the rub with this latest lawsuit is that sex-quota activists have been using the Three-Part Test to force sex-balancing on high schools. The law neither allows this nor was ever designed for this.”

The implications here are profound. In high school, the gender balance of students is essentially 50/50. Despite this, about 1.3 million more boys than girls participate in high school sports. For boys, interscholastic competition is their preferred type of extracurricular activity. Given that most high schools are under extraordinary financial pressures, the easiest way for any school to comply with Title IX’s Three-Part Test will be to limit the number of boys who participate in sports in order to make the numbers balance. That will likely result in roster caps, and eventually, the outright elimination of many teams.

We are excited to bring you the official Back To The Shack music video!   Premiering via Nosiey - click the photo to watch