Does Reviewer Quality Matter?
You can buy almost anything online these days — hotel reservations, books, movies, etc. — but how much does reviewer quality matter to online shoppers? A lot, according to research from Anindya Ghose and Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis. In a previous paper, the pair noticed that “demand for a hotel increases if the online reviews on TripAdvisor and Travelocity are well-written, without spelling errors; this holds no matter if the review is positive or negative.” In a more recent paper, Ghose and Ipeirotis find similar trends for products on Amazon.com. Read More »
What Is Google’s “Largest Investment to Date”?
According to the official Google blog, it’s a recent $168 million investment in a solar-power plant:
Read More »We’ve invested $168 million in an exciting new solar energy power plant being developed by BrightSource Energy in the Mojave Desert in California. Brightsource’s Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) will generate 392 gross MW of clean, solar energy. That’s the equivalent of taking more than 90,000 cars off the road over the lifetime of the plant, projected to be more than 25 years. The investment makes business sense and will help ensure that one of the world’s largest solar energy projects is completed.
Part Two, Contest Results: Piers Morgan and PETA Take on GoDaddy CEO (or the other way around?)
Last week’s post about Bob Parsons, CEO and Founder of GoDaddy, and his face-off against Piers Morgan and PETA over hunting elephants in Zimbabwe generated a lot of comments. Dean Karlan offers a follow-up, choosing a winner for the best comment, and delving further into the debate on whether elephants in Zimbabwe are endangered or if their population needs culling. Read More »
April 11: The Most Boring Day in History
Using alogrithms that weight values for more than three million facts including historical events, birthdays of significant people, etc, a sophisticated computer program has determined that April 11, 1954 was the most boring day in human history. Read More »
and 
. If you haven’t seen it yet, the movie features Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, and was made by a dream team of documentary directors. Paste Magazine named it one of the 