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Supersonic Flight, Technology, and the Overland Ban with Sam Hammond

What follows is an edited transcript of my conversation with Sam Hammond.

Petersen: My guest today is Sam Hammond. He’s a policy analyst at the Niskanen Center. Sam, welcome to Economics Detective Radio.

Hammond: Hi!

Petersen: Our topic today is supersonic air travel.

Sam has written an article titled “Make America Boom Again” along with co-author Eli Dourado which revisits the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s ban on supersonic flight over the United States. So Sam let’s start at the very start. Let’s start by talking about the history of flight. How do we get from the Wright brothers to supersonic flight?

Hammond: Well I think the most notable thing about the early history of aviation is how quickly and how rapidly we innovated. So the Wright brothers flew their initial voyage, their milestone flight in 1903 at seven miles per hour and within forty years we were already breaking the speed of sound. And actually very shortly after that not only were we breaking the speed of sound within military jets but we were on the cusp of commercializing it through the Concorde. (more…)

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The post Supersonic Flight, Technology, and the Overland Ban with Sam Hammond appeared first on The Economics Detective.

Understanding the Karni Belief-Revelation Mechanism

Suppose you wanted to find out someone’s subjective belief in the likelihood of a given event. Your first instinct might be to offer them betting odds on the event. If they would accept odds of 2:1 but no lower, you might conclude that they believe the event to have a 33.3% chance of occurring.

This would be correct if the person you’re offering the bet to is risk neutral. But if they’re risk averse, they might actually believe the event has a 50% likelihood of occurring, and they just require more favourable odds to compensate them for accepting risk.

Luckily, there’s a better way to elicit subjective probabilities. It comes from Karni (2009), a short paper published in Econometrica.* (more…)

The post Understanding the Karni Belief-Revelation Mechanism appeared first on The Economics Detective.

Understanding the Karni Belief-Revelation Mechanism

Suppose you wanted to find out someone’s subjective belief in the likelihood of a given event. Your first instinct might be to offer them betting odds on the event. If they would accept odds of 2:1 but no lower, you might conclude that they believe the event to have a 33.3% chance of occurring.

This would be correct if the person you’re offering the bet to is risk neutral. But if they’re risk averse, they might actually believe the event has a 50% likelihood of occurring, and they just require more favourable odds to compensate them for accepting risk.

Luckily, there’s a better way to elicit subjective probabilities. It comes from Karni (2009), a short paper published in Econometrica.* (more…)

The post Understanding the Karni Belief-Revelation Mechanism appeared first on The Economics Detective.