transcyberia.info - infonomics

the spam arms race

nospam@example.com (Guido Stevens) — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 14:53:00 +0200

The war on spam is mostly waged between spammers and ISP's, invisible to the public.

Earlier I wrote about greylisting. That's a fairly minimal change in handling email, that reduces the spam volume on our mail servers disproportionately. How can this be? Let's take a look at the economics involved.

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evolutionary economics and open source

nospam@example.com (Guido Stevens) — Sat, 10 May 2008 09:52:00 +0200

In Why most things fail, Paul Ormerod gleefully attacks economic orthodoxy. Traditional economic theory fails to explain the complexity and dynamics of the real world. Much more promising is an artificial life approach. Here, unpredictable interactions between simple agents give rise to complex behavior of the system as a whole.

Creating a simple computer model of a software market in which some firms pursue an open source strategy turns out to be very instructive, and funny.

See the group of ooo.......> agents up top? That's the open sourcers, competing with the closed source xxxxx.........> firms. You can click on the image to see an animation, or download the model and run your own simulations.

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the economics of free

nospam@example.com (Guido Stevens) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:23:00 +0100

Chris Anderson is a smart guy, but his Wired article on the zero dollar economy has some major flaws.

Convoluting the fixed costs of filling a server rack, with the marginal cost of serving additional customers, with economies of scale, is rather confusing. The fact that serving an extra customer is free, does nothing to explain how you'll reach return on investment and pay for depreciation. Nor does scaling, which does explain a tendency to monopolization, but that isn't mentioned.
Narrowing externalities down to the non-monetary values of reputation and attention is rather unhelpful. There's enough monetary externalities that merit attention. Network effects, anyone?
A glaring deficiency is any treatment of transaction costs. It's transaction costs diving to zero, far more than marginal costs diving to zero, that powers the surge in networked business today. The two are highly complementary.

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spamonomics - the economics of spam fighting

nospam@example.com (Guido Stevens) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 12:29:00 +0100

Externalities, asymmetric information, game theory, network effects, innovation diffusion: understanding the countermeasures arrayed against spam, involves a venerable catalog of analysis tools in the economics of information.

Since this is just a blog post, not a book, I'll try and keep it short and sweet.

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