Our train conductor just broke in over the PA system to announce this news live, in four languages. www.latimes.com/california/s...

Star ratings are hard to ignore. Even when we’re looking for quality, our brains steer us toward cheaper stuff online. Christopher Mims explains why.

Interesting reporting from @bencasselman.bsky.social, suggests Instacart is performing (or allowing) quite extensive personalized price discrimination.

Acts done out of love, Nietzsche once said, stand beyond good and evil. If this is what art amounts to, we should be grateful to Alice Munro for reminding us to be properly frightened of it. muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/articl...

In honor of #GivingTuesday, my wife & I are matching donations (up to $20K) to the ASFOP Teega Wende Orphanage in 🇧🇫Burkina Faso🇧🇫, which supports over 200 orphans and we have supported for over a decade. 1/2

I don't know if Texas deserves to be in the playoffs, but I do know what all the other playoff teams are hoping for.

Some news: I will be spending this entire 2025-26 academic year located in Paris, visiting the local universities and participating in the research community here. If you work in Paris or are just passing though in the next year, please reach out, I'd be happy to meet up! PhD students especially!

This is an interesting set of academic research papers about the increasingly key debate of when AI should be used to label data (an expensive task we use humans for) Yang et al show that AI answers are quite different than human, but Briggs finds it may be because AI is better than human RAs!

I think Southwest Airlines should revert its website to what they had in 1995

Yes it is.

An absolutely unreal performance from Shohei Ohtani to complete the Dodgers' NLCS sweep 🧹

Attention IO job market candidates: Sometimes speakers in the CMA's external economics seminar series have to cancel at relatively short notice. We would love for these slots to go to JMCs to present their job market paper. Drop me a message if you are interested or share with those who might be.

❗❗❗🚨🚨🚨 Next @cepr.org IO Virtual Gathering is taking place on NOVEMBER 7 at 2pm CET. 1st hr is dedicated to JM presentations by IO candidates graduating from Eur / UK schools. If interested, please submit a draft of your JMP & CV at: t.co/aUTPTWSten by OCTOBER 26! 🚨🚨🚨 ❗❗❗ #econjobmarket

This paper shows that you can predict actual purchase intent (90% accuracy) by asking an off-the-shelf LLM to impersonate a customer with a demographic profile, giving it a product image & having it give its impressions, which another AI rates. No fine-tuning or training & beats classic ML methods.

On one hand: don't anthropomorphize AI. On the other: LLMs exhibit signs of gambling addiction. The more autonomy they were given, the more risks the LLMs took. They exhibit gambler's fallacy, loss-chasing, illusion of control... A cautionary note for using LLMs for investing without guardrails.

ENO UNIVERSE playlist! A retrospective of Brian Eno’s body of work from 1972-1995 including his solo rock and ambient records and his collaborations with Bowie,Talking Heads, U2, Devo, Fripp, etc! All links and annotated tracklisting in the newsletter issue fluxblog.substack.com/p/fluxblog-5...

Here are your 10 -essential- AI prompts for academics ... make your life easy with help from @profserious.bsky.social profserious.substack.com/p/10-ai-prom...

Wild chart: www.nytimes.com/2025/10/05/u...

The videos from the NBER Economics of Transformative AI conference are well worth your time. www.nber.org/conferences/...

It looks like he didn't share it on Bluesky, so I will. @afinetheorem.bsky.social has written an excellent review article covering 7 recent books on the economics of AI that serves as an excellent overview of this topic. Highly recommended! kevinbryanecon.com/BryanAIBookR...

I can confirm that the cuisine in France is on another level

🚨*New research*🚨 Together with Tai Lam, Nicolas Padilla, and Anja Lambrecht: we study the impact of LLMs on user behavior across the web. We use a large and detailed panel of user-level online browsing from 2022 – 2023 and study how consumers' behavior changes after they adopt AI tools.

saw this tweet and checked my calculator history and I'm losing it

The GOAT

Eight rules to regain trust in universities. All can be done today. They're absolutely not the core beliefs about the role of the university for some faculty right now, but are essential if we're to contribute to the trusted production and diffusion of knowledge. kevinbryanecon.com/trust.html

Some news: I will be spending this entire 2025-26 academic year located in Paris, visiting the local universities and participating in the research community here. If you work in Paris or are just passing though in the next year, please reach out, I'd be happy to meet up! PhD students especially!

This is a very serious problem, not only directly because of the corruption alleged, but because it undermines and harms confidence in the entire process. www.wsj.com/politics/pol...

Working for the University of California while also living in France - I have reached truly elite levels of spending time dealing with inscrutable bureaucracy and filling out forms.

Killing SB 79 will make Los Angeles a less affordable, less sustainable place -- it'll keep us on the same trajectory we've been on since SB 827 and SB 50 were killed almost a decade ago. Why is the mayor going out of her way to oppose it? There's no excuse for this.

Terence Tao (@teorth.bsky.social) has written a thread on Mastodon about the impact of the federal grant freeze to UCLA, particularly to his own field of Mathematics. UCLA's IPAM (Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics) could shut down entirely mathstodon.xyz/@tao/1149568...

I can't stress how damaging this is. Destroys trust in core government statistics.

The Justice Department fired two of its most senior antitrust enforcers after internal disagreements over how much discretion their division should have to police mergers.

Berkeley professor's ex-wife arrested in connection with his murder in Greece

🚨Free data alert!! 🚨 Please share. Large new dataset of Amazon product reviews, including full text and photos and product characteristics, with individual *reviews labeled as fake reviews*. I believe this is the first publicly available data of this kind. github.com/bretthollenb...

Extremely informative video. An economist would call this an equilibrium unravelling -- makes a lot of sense why so much needs to be gated now. If webcrawling turns a non-excludable product into a competitor, then businesses will do their damndest to make it excludable...

far be it from me to tell scientists how to do their jobs but i feel like there might be value in surveying the <365 hot dogs per year demographic

Nice article summarizing new research by Sherry He on the impact of sustainability labels on Amazon on product demand.

Reminder that today is the deadline for submissions to the always excellent FTC Microeconomics conference: www.ftc.gov/news-events/...

patiently explaining at the bank that the cocktail is my signature

This is the big one. Really great news for the future of California.

A couple of funny quotes from Al Roth on psychology and economics

In a truly tectonic Overton Window shift, the California Assembly just voted 63-0 to advance #AB609, a major new bill by Buffy Wicks to create a statutory exemption from CEQA for environmentally friendly infill housing. Fantastic news for both housing and the environment!

Maybe journals should have a policy that data from anonymous sources will be verified by the journal before publication. The editor could contact the firm, to verify that it exists and that the study was conducted as stated. @aeadata.bsky.social is this feasible or am I missing something?

The Market for Fake Brides

Pretty big L for prediction markets, which have otherwise been on a good run. Of course, no reason to think a Papal Conclave would be the type of thing markets are good for in the first place.

Must read post about why Prop 13 is the original sin of California's housing crisis, but not for the reason most people think.

All else being equal, mode shift is much more important as a climate mitigation strategy than mode electrification

I wrote a book and it's out today. This is not a drill. Get the book critics are calling "captivating, charged and crucially provocative": SECOND LIFE: HAVING A CHILD IN THE DIGITAL AGE bookshop.org/p/books/seco...