Agree/Disagree and Why?

TED talks are always unique ways to learn interesting information or really provide a platform for people with strong convictions and life lessons.

In the first ted talk, it was really interesting how economists were able to apply the laws of economics and probability to help individuals make decisions by correlating different subjects and analyzing. "First, the field of economics has spent decades developing a toolkit aimed at investigating empirical relationships, focusing on techniques to help understand which correlations speak to a causal relationship and which do not." (Athey & Luca, 2019)

In the modern world, we have grown so exponentially that many new business strategies are being created in a very different space for your traditional brick and mortar business operation. As the technology field expands so must the understanding of behavior patterns of their consumers like economists! I was surprised to learn that by creating artificial scarcity this would lead people to be stricter with their choices therefore really investing in their matches online. In chapter 17 we learned about risk versus uncertainty. "In other words, uncertainty is a way of characterizing what we don't know about the distribution of the random variables themselves."(Froeb, pg 226, 2016) I think this directly correlates in the dating apps, being a user myself I understand about the limits of likes as I tend to scrutinize more. I am part of yet another statistic, unfortunately. The third thing I learned about was the high-value/low-value trade off concept. The book discusses that by being able to identify high value customers then you are able to price discriminate, this very much relates to the second TED talk as it relates to the netting to prevent malaria. The concern is that there is a question of how the consumer sees the value in the net and if they will end up using it for something else. If companies who donate the nets would then charge a price instead of donating, which essentially would discriminate to the people in order to get them to value the item and use it for its intended use. I have never considered that this kind of analysis is how decisions are made to properly provide aid and help reduce diseases and deaths in third world countries. I would definitely like to sit in on discussions for these types of conversations.