economics

What happened to margins when German petrol stations adopted pricing software, and the substantial body of research arguing the simulation results are fragile, parameter-dependent, and may not survive contact with real markets.

The simulation result that started an entire literature: independent Q-learning agents converging on supra-competitive prices with punishment strategies, nobody having programmed them to, and what the mechanism actually is.

From revenue management to reinforcement learning: the mechanics of software that sets prices, the distinction between following rules and learning a policy, and why that distinction turns out to be the one that matters.

A single tariff rarely stays single. The country you tax taxes you back, chosen to hurt where it stings most, and an escalation spiral can leave both sides worse off. Learn the mechanics of retaliation, why trade wars resemble a game where cooperation is best but defection is tempting, how supply chains reroute around barriers, and the hidden cost of uncertainty itself.

If a tariff is mostly paid at home, why do governments impose them at all? Because tariffs do several jobs at once: raise revenue, shield domestic industries, build strategic capacity, and pressure other countries. Learn each rationale, the gains-from-trade logic they push against, and the real trade-off every tariff makes between concentrated benefits and spread-out costs.

A tariff is a tax on imports, and almost everything people believe about who pays it is wrong. Learn the mechanism: who legally hands over the money at the border, the difference between who pays and who bears the cost, how that cost splits between foreign exporters, importers, and consumers, and what decades of economic studies actually measure.

Hundreds of billions of dollars a year are being spent on AI infrastructure. Is that rational investment or a bubble? This lesson gives you the tools to reason about it: what capex is and why it dwarfs AI revenue today, the depreciation trap of fast-aging chips, what circular financing means, and the two coherent cases, for and against, so you can judge for yourself.

Some products get better the more people use them, and that single property explains why a handful of platforms dominate the digital world. Learn what a network effect actually is, the difference between direct, indirect, and data effects, why Metcalfe's law overstates the case, and how the same feedback loop that creates a monopoly also makes it fragile at the start.

The creator economy is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and most creators in it make very little. That is not a failure of the market; it is the shape of the market. Learn why creator income follows a brutal power law, how the same feed algorithm that finds hits also concentrates rewards, what the 1,000 true fans idea gets right and wrong, and what the math means if you are the creator.

Nobody sets the price of an ad slot by hand. An auction does it, billions of times a day, in the time it takes a page to load. Learn why advertising runs on auctions, how the second-price idea makes bidding honest, why the highest bid often loses to a better ad, and why the industry quietly switched from second-price to first-price auctions.

Why the semiconductor industry separated into fabless designers and a handful of contract manufacturers, the capital economics that drive relentless concentration, and the map of who actually makes the world's chips.