Measuring the greater fool effect

Felix Salmon had some interesting insights recently on bubbles:

The word “bubble”, at least for me, is a loaded term, with a specific meaning. For one thing, it implies speculation: people buying an asset which is going up in price, just because they think they’re going to be able to sell it to a greater fool at a substantial profit. The dot-com bubble was a prime example of that, with investors jumping onto high-flying technology stocks not because they thought the stocks were cheap but just because they thought the stocks were rising, and that they could make money day-trading these things. Much of the housing bubble looked like that too: you could buy a tract home in Phoenix with no money down, hold on to it for a few months, and then flip it for a substantial payday — even if you never expected to live in it. And certainly the bitcoin bubble fits the bill: pretty much the only reason to buy bitcoins and hold them for more than about 10 minutes is that you think they’re going to go up in value and that you’ll be able to make money as a result.

I have to wonder if there's not a way to measure at least part of what Salmon is talking about while it's actually happening. Is there, for example, some kind of survey or other instrument that could measure different expectations about the long and short term value of an investment by those about to purchase it? In a bubble, you would think that the numbers for the short term would climb relative to the long term. This is way out of my field so I have no idea if someone has looked at this.

Of course, investors might be reluctant to answer these questions honestly, even to themselves. This might be a good place to try implicit association tests. Being a relatively new approach, it's possible no one has tried this particular application yet. Not an easy test to set up but it might be worth thinking about.

Patents and Copyrights

I really liked this point by Dean Baker:

Those who like to point to the constitutional origin of these forms of property should note where patents and copyrights appear in the constitution. They are listed as a power of Congress along with other powers, like the power to tax. They do not appear in the Bill of Rights where rights of individuals are explicitly described.

The constitution authorizes Congress to create monopolies for limited periods of time "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." In this sense, patents and copyrights are explicitly linked to a public purpose. If it were determined that patents and copyrights are not the most efficient means for promoting innovation and creative work, and therefore Congress decided to stop authorizing these monopolies, individuals would have no more constitutional basis for complaint than if Congress decided that it didn't need to raise taxes.

Once we recognize that patents and copyrights are policies to promote innovation and creative work then the question is whether they are best policy and if so, are they best structured now for this purpose. Neither assumption is obvious and I would argue that the latter is almost certainly not true.

I think the analogy with taxes is both instructive and really informs the debate.  Nobody questions that the United States government has the ability to collect taxes.  But the level of taxes are set at the threshold that maximizes the general welfare and not as high as possible.  In the same sense, intellectual property law should be set at a level that encourages/rewards creativity and not at the highest level possible.

In both cases the extremes of the policy are as bad as an absence of any policy.  If you set taxes to ~100% then you'd end up with no economy (or a purely shadow economy).  That would be bad.  If you set intellectual property rights to too high of a standard then you have endless rent-seeking on the basis of a vague idea that was never properly developed. 

This is not to say that property rights are unimportant.  But it does illustrate that the way we define and reward these rights is a socially determined decision.  The consequences of such decisions reflect the society in which the decision is made and not some sort of natural evidence of merit. 

Be wary of simple explanations of how carefully developed theory is clearly and absurdly wrong

Steve Landsburg has a rather unique take on the world, most recently manifested by this piece.  It was then counter attacked by Daniel Kuehn, Brad DeLong, Paul Krugman, and Mark Thoma.  One thing that this episode teaches us is that we should remain skeptical about simple explanations about why everything we think we know is wrong (or that well established theories immediately lead to absurd conclusions).  It can happen, of course, but these sort of amazing results are a) rare and b) usually the result of painstaking work. 

Intellectual property laws and innovation a DIY post

Beating back some deadlines at the moment so I'll leave this one as a project for the readers.

1. Read this piece by Kal Raustiala and Christopher Sprigman in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs called “Fake It Till You Make It,” which, as Felix Salmon puts it, makes "a strong case that Chinese piracy, far from being symptomatic of a deep-seated inability to innovate, is actually an economically vital form of innovation.";

2. Read Salmon's appreciate take, paying close attention to this to what both pieces say about Ben Franklin's copyright violations;

3. Finish up with this post from last year listing other, more recent major media empires that got their start by playing fast and loose with copyright laws.

Rooting for Netflix (no really)

I realize I've been a bit rough on Reed Hastings and the Netflix business plan and strategies. There are real reasons to be concerned about how the company is being run and how business journalists are covering it, reasons that often get glossed over in the standard narrative, but, in an attempt to add some balance, though, I'm afraid I may be leaving the wrong impression.

For all its problems, there is a lot to like about Netflix. It is, by many metrics, a successful company. In an age of free media, it has built a substantial base of paying customers. It provides a pretty good service at a very reasonable price. Most importantly, Netflix introduces diversity into the dangerously inbred world of major media.

Minor media is fine, as a musician friend of mine recently observed, the people now control the means of production. Anyone can record and mix an album or produce a movie. If, however, you need access to a large budget or a mass outlet or, perhaps most vitally, any kind of press (mandatory Weigel link), you pretty much have to deal with a handful of massive companies, some terribly mismanaged, others oblivious to the interests of the general public, all focused on creating a less and less diversified landscape.

Netflix offers a healthy counterbalance to that concentration of power. That counterbalance is particularly important given that the company's two main competitors are Amazon (speaking of unhealthy concentration of power) and Hulu (one of the most flagrant antitrust violations in recent memory).

I'd really like to see Hastings and company make a go of it. That's one of the reasons I wish they were better at their jobs.

Kevin Spacey has been playing brilliant, manipulative sociopaths for a long time -- another Netflix side note

Kevin Spacey is a stunning actor of tremendous range but as I was putting together recent posts on playing to vs. playing against expectations and how that relates to Netflix, it struck me just often often Spacey has played the sociopath (see for yourself) going all the way back to his first big national role twenty-five years ago.

Actual vs. perceived viewing costs -- side note to the Netflix

Since we're on the subject of streaming vs. traditional TV, here are some n=1 observations.

Even in the case of free (or, more generally, no marginal cost) programming, I'll wager we've all felt cheated after watching a disappointing show. "There's an hour I'll never get back" sums the feeling up nicely. Therefore, part of getting potential viewers to sample a show is creating a low perceived viewing cost and risk of wasted time.

Here's where the n=1 comes in. I've noticed when I channel surf or I realize that a favorite show is about to start, I tend to underestimate the commitment associated with checking it out while simultaneously overestimating the scarcity. Since I don't know when my next chance to see it will be, I'll just watch until Columbo comes in or the Magnificent Seven talk to the old man or Ray Liota takes Lorraine Bracco to the Copa. Invariably, though, when those moments pass, I keep watching.

From a marketing standpoint, the combination of low perceived cost and scarcity is extraordinarily powerful (check out any marketing psychology book for examples), By comparison, when I sit down to watch something on-demand there's no sense of scarcity, I'm more aware of opportunity costs and, for some reason, I feel more like I'm making a commitment to watch the whole show -- opening credits to closing credits.

What a Hulu or a Netflix does have is a selling point often inversely related to scarcity, convenience. "Watch what you want to watch it." The key piece there is "what you want to watch." Once you've made your selection, convenience becomes a big plus.

It is often useful to think of marketing as three stages of persuasion:

1. Convince customers they want a product;

2. Convince them they want to buy it from you;

3. Convince them they want it now.

Recommendation algorithms do a good job with the third and, if you're seeing the recommendation, the second probably isn't a problem. I do not, however, see them doing a good job with the first, at least not without a great deal of help.

Interview with FX President John Landgraf

I'm not a big fan of KCRW's The Business (imagine Entertainment Tonight trying to do Marketplace), but like most interview-based shows, the right subject can make it worth your time.

If you have any interest in the business of television, John Landgraf's segment is something you should check out. Landgraf is a smart guy playing the game at a very sophisticated level. Even when his decisions seem to turn out badly, you can see the sound business reasoning behind them.

The interview is about a year old but with the Netflix programming push a hot topic and the general matter of the economics of original programming getting so much attention, it seems like a good time to check in with someone who actually knows how to make money doing this.

Here's the blurb from KCRW:

President of FX, John Landgraf talks with Kim Masters about the unusually hands-off deal he made with comedian Louis CK for his show, Louie. Essentially FX wires him money and he sends them a show. There's virtually no oversight or input from the network. It's a deal that many in the industry envy but something that Landgraf says that not every creator could handle. 

Landgraf is no stranger to placing bets on shows, and a new show that he's hoping will pay off is Anger Management, starring Charlie Sheen. Landgraf tells Kim that he was prepared to pass on the show but was taken in by the pitch. He also outlines the deal points, which include an unusual arrangement where if the first season of ten episodes gets a certain ratings number then the show will be automatically renewed for 90 episodes. 

Finally, with hits like It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Sons of Anarchy and Justified, FX skews towards a guy audience. Landgraf talks with Kim about this and also about why he passed on Breaking Bad.

"Things we no longer see on airplanes" from Mental Floss

Kara Kovalchik has an amusing collection of TV spots and photos from print ads showing some of the amenities airlines experimented with before deregulation. One of these days, this might be a good starting point for a new air travel thread, but for now just sit back and enjoy the flight.

Two quotes about Netflix, presented (almost) without comment

Nearing the end of the thread...

Forbes contributor Kosha Gada wrote a somewhat breathless, wave-of-the-future article up about Netflix that included the following:

Of course, the end game may well lie in pivoting away from subscriptions and distribution altogether and moving into the world of content licensing.  This would fundamentally change the company’s equation. Whether a move to content licensing is the key to Netflix’s future growth is yet to be seen, but it certainly sets up fascinating new dynamics—and ironies—for the broader industry.

Put that along side this footnote from the previously mentioned article by Rebecca Greenfield:

This post originally stated that Netflix owned the syndication rights to House of Cards. However, The production company Media Rights Capital own them.

I don't want to make to much of this. Netflix may be planning a pivot to content licensing somewhere down the road. Still, reporting like this does add to my suspicion that the standard narrative has not emerged naturally from the facts on the ground.

Burn Notice and more at Hulu

If you're tired of talking about television and would like to watch some for a change...



(though if you do want to focus on the business of television, check out the arrangement Hulu has made with the cable providers for the more recent episodes.)

I'd also recommend this (particularly the series finale Christmas episode which took things in a totally unexpected direction). Completely ruined the American version for me.



And though I have mixed feelings about Hulu-plus (and Hulu in general -- how can anyone argue this doesn't violate anti-trust laws?), the Criterion Collection really is a film-lover's dream

Weekend blogging -- who are the Becketts in your field and who are the Pinters?

[keep in mind while reading the following that it has been more than twenty years since I read these plays. If you've read either author in this century your opinion is probably worth more than mine.]

I know there are some who would dispute this but I think most critics and literary scholars would, with all due respect to both writers, rank Beckett over Pinter. It's not a position I'm prepared to defend (though I am inclined to agree with it), but, if you are willing to go along with it, the proposition suggests a somewhat counter-intuitive result: the greater writer is the less influential.

I'm using influence here in a fairly specific way to mean later writers' use of specific elements associated with Beckett's and Pinter's work, not to mean general impact. Lots of writers might tell you that see Godot changed their life without being able to point to anything specific in the play that changed in their work.

It's not difficult to why much of Beckett's best known work isn't that widely imitated. When you've written a play where the staging consists of three actors' heads sticking out of urns with the final stage direction "repeat play" and you actually name it Play, you haven't left future generations a lot to build on. I remember being more impressed by Play than by the Birthday Party, but I had no urge to go out and write my own actors-in-furniture cycle.

Lots of writers did go out and try to write their own versions of Pinter plays and many more have incorporated Pinteresque elements, creating a sense of absurdity or menace by the strangely off-kilter use of mundane and colloquial language. You can see Pinter's influence even in popular genres like science fiction (it was actually an arc of the no-budget British time-travel series Sapphire and Steel that got me thinking about this), horror (check out the bar scene in the Shining) and even sitcom. By Beckett's pop culture presence is largely limited to allusion (an unpunctual character might be compared to Godot, for example)

If you've played along up until now, I have a question for you: in your field, who are the Becketts and who are the Pinters?

For example, in mathematics I think you could make a case for Newton as a Beckett and Leibniz (due partly to his superior notation) as a Pinter. When I asked a musician friend, he immediately suggested Thelonius Monk as a Beckett, brilliant but something of a terminal point.

Other than that the competition is open. How would you complete the sentence: Though __________ was more brilliant, _________ was more influential.

House of Cards -- either already in the black or seriously underperforming

More from the ongoing Netflix thread, but I promise the end is near.

One of the underlying issues I have with the coverage of trendy companies is the lack of interest in facts that seem to undercut the narrative and a lack of skepticism about facts that seem to support it.

Take Rebecca Greenfield's gushy story "Netflix Has Almost Already Paid for 'House of Cards' in New Subscribers":

By adding more than 2 million U.S. subscribers this quarter and another 1 million elsewhere in the world, Netflix has nearly earned back its entire $100 million investment in House of Cards — in under three months. As we explained in our breakdown of the economics of that original show, Netflix only needed about 520,834 new users — in two years — to break even on that program. But the streaming and delivery businesses have added nearly $50 million in subscriber dollars in this country alone, Netflix announced in its earnings report Monday. If you include the overseas users, that number goes up to about $72 million.

Of course, not all of these new (paying) customers will stick around for two years — and Netflix has other costs besides its high-profile leap into original programming, including Hemlock Grove, which premiered this weekend, and the comeback of Arrested Development, which is expected to offer another subscriber boost when it debuts Memorial Day weekend. But CEO Reid Hastings [sic] said in his letter to investors Monday that fewer than 8,000 new users participated in "free-trial gaming — that is, hardly anyone signed up, binged-watched House of Cards, then quit Netflix. If the company keeps building loyal subscribers at this rate into 2014, when it premieres a new series from the Wachowskis, Netflix should be able to break even on all of its original programming — by our calculations, that would take 2.6 million new paying subscribers a month every per year — and then some.

The about free-trial actually is a piece of genuinely good news for the company, but that really spectacular part raises some questions, particularly when you follow the link in Greenfield's story:

Netflix announced net additions of 2.03 million subscribers in the U.S. compared to 2.05 million in the fourth quarter — which historically is its strongest period of subscriber growth — and 1.74 million in last year’s first quarter. As a result, it said that it’s growing its subscriber base and revenues faster than its content spend in the streaming business. It reported that its domestic streaming contribution margin increased to 20.6 percent in the quarter, which was up 140 basis points from the previous quarter

...
In addition to its domestic streaming numbers, Netflix reported 1 million new subscribers in its international business, growing that number to 7.1 million total. That compares to 1.8 million international subscribers added during the holiday quarter, and 1.2 million a year previous. While those numbers might seem low compared to previous quarters, Netflix said it benefitted from launches in new markets in earlier quarters. The company plans to continue its expansion overseas, with a new international market to be added in the second half of the year.

Just to review, in addition to launching a $100 million dollar series, they mounted a huge and very expensive marketing blitz in an improving economy, benefited from the increasing popularity of dropping cable, and offered a heavily advertised free month trial for what is already an extremely inexpensive service.

There are a lot of reasons I might be misreading this -- being LA-based I might be seeing a disproportionate amount of marketing; there may good news if you dig deeper into the numbers; I might just be screwing up -- but looking at these stories and trying to draw reasonable inferences about the accounts attributable to House of Cards, here's what I take away:

1. There's no evidence here that the show was responsible for any of those one million international accounts given the sharp drop;

2. With the LA caveat in mind, it looks like Netflix substantially increased its ads-and-flacks budget in the first quarter ("including advertising buys for primetime TV spots and high-profile billboards"). Twenty million strikes me as a fairly conservative estimate for the increase. If that's close, we're talking significant acquisition costs for what looks like a 300K bump;

(Not just LA)

3. At least some of that 300K should probably be attributed to economic conditions and the widely noted trend away from cable and toward online viewing;

4. A good night at the Emmy's could change this, but, given the direct-to-binge model and the February debut, I'd expect most of the subscribers attributable to House of Cards to sign up sometime in the first quarter. The 520K Greenfield mentions does not seem to include marketing costs which would push it closer to 600K. This would require a substantial bump from the second season as well.

Don't get wrong. As a viewer, I'm very happy with this boom in original programming (my favorite show at the moment is Justified) and I'm looking forward to watching House of Cards. Nor should to much be read into the performance of one show. I'll even allow for the possibility the show catching on and/or of Netflix having a good run and actually becoming a major player for years to come.

What I have trouble with is declaring victory for a player who may not even be winning, particularly when that victory fits far too nicely with a dominant narrative.

Keep up with West Coast Stat Views on Twitter at @MarkPalko1

Damn, another activity I can no longer make fun of.

Yves Smith with more thoughts on the looting phase of higher education

Naked Capitalism has a post up discussing the previously mentioned Pam Martens article on NYU Law School compensation for administrators and select professors.

Now the house deal (which is rather bizarre given that NYU owns lots of nice faculty housing) might be what made [Jack] Lew’s pay deal so out of line relative to his job. But if the forgiveness of debt was not included in the total, it’s even more insane, the equivalent of $1.1 million a year.

There’s simply no way this compensation level (or the house side deal) was justified by any notion of what the position demanded. You don’t need a marquee name for an operations job. I can give a long list of people I know personally who have more relevant experience and be happy with a ton less money. Nor is there any evidence that Lew did enough in the way of fundraising to justify his NYU pay level. This was a low-stress overpaid sinecure arranged by the Rubin mafia.

And it’s important to recognize that this sort of rent extraction by unproductive overhead is a significant contributor to the explosion in education costs. When I was young, the top administrators were modestly paid. They viewed the job as quasi public service. The hours were generally not taxing, although the politics could be fractious. The faculty looked down on you but you had lots of stature in the local community, the top echelon might live in housing the school owned as a perk and you got the bennies of university life. The sort of people who took those jobs were old money who’d spent some time in the private sector and wanted a change of pace in their middle age or executives who’d lost out in corporate intrigue or via a takeover.

Benjamin Ginsberg says that 30% of the increase in educational costs over the last twenty-five years is due to administrative “growth”. That sounds low to me, and I’d imagine the overheads have attributed as much of their costs as possible to program. For instance, universities have also overspent on facilities, and a big building program not only justifies more adminisphere, but some of those costs may have been allocated to the big build rather than as ongoing overheads. I mean, why have Jack Lew types around if they can’t pretty up the books?