Applied Managerial Economics

The Signals vs Noise blog recently cited [via Carly Bishop Cheney] — aside: Carly's home page is dozens of megabytes so you might want to skip the link on your iPhone — the following tweet:

If I get one more inquiry from someone having a huge wedding at an expensive venue asking for ‘recession pricing’ I am going to explode!

Many comments support the logic that because the expenses haven't changed, there is no reason to consider changing the prices. This is, of course, missing half of the equation. A market has a supply curve (this is your expenses) and a demand curve. You are pricing at a markup over your cost, so, indeed, you do have some room to readjust prices.

Certainly, recessions can change the demand curve so it is worth considering whether this has any effect on the elasticity of demand at your current price. If you can increase your profit by lowering prices (thus selling more of your goods or services), you should certainly consider it, but, of course, one must consider the longer terms effects of this strategy. On the other hand, you might also consider raising your prices and selling less, but at a higher price. Elasticity will determine which strategy maximises profit.

I'm surprised that there are so many comments by those who things lowering their price during a recession is such a ridiculous proposition, mainly on the basis that their expenses haven't changed.

Great Post About IT Restrictions in the Workplace

My friend, former coworkers and MBS alum has a thoughtful post following on some of the themes from a previous post. In it, he sites a great Slate article which argues for a loosening of IT restrictions:

…The restrictions infantilize workers—they foster resentment, reduce morale, lock people into inefficient routines, and, worst of all, they kill our incentives to work productively. In the information age, most companies’ success depends entirely on the creativity and drive of their workers. IT restrictions are corrosive to that creativity—they keep everyone under the thumb of people who have no idea which tools we need to do our jobs but who are charged with deciding anyway.

Ameel thoughtfully concludes that IT departments would be wise to add their own in-house analysts to match IT tools available to those in the company who might need to use them, lest services be blocked somewhat arbitrarily.

What is often missing is…:

• In-house IT Consulting: the people who liaise directly with different parts of the business and use the latest technologies to improve the way those people work
  

Without that fourth part, IT departments have a hard time keeping up with what people in the organization believe are the most effective and efficient ways of doing their work. They also don’t keep up with the latest technological solutions for various business problems.

I couldn't agree more. I'd like to think that my former team in Melbourne Business School performed that function admirably. Often, we would just connect business users with simple off-the-shelf services that would dramatically effect productivity. Three examples would be Confluence, Google Groups, and Google Desktop, but there are many more.

Minor Thesis: Inference of Enumerated Types In Java

If you're not from the Computer Science discipline, you can safely skip this post.

After doing some hard drive spring-cleaning, I came across the Latex files relating to my master's thesis at the University of Melbourne. Although I undertook a Masters of Software Systems Engineering by coursework, I was able to write a minor thesis in lieu of 2 subjects.

At the time, compilers and type analysis were of particular interest to me, having thoroughly enjoyed the Compiler Design class at McGill several months earlier. In that class, we wrote a compiler for a toy language called WIG and added features to an existing compiler for the JOOS language, a subset of Java. We used the SableCC lexer/parser, an open source compiler compiler written by another McGill student. I remember staying up several late nights before the project was due. It was great fun.

The forthcoming language enhancements in Java 5 provided a good platform for static code analysis and enhancement; a similar paper inferred generic types, for example. I had also competed a survey of programming languages class which compared functional, logic and imperative language (Haskell, Prolog and Java respectively) taught by Peter Schachte. Peter was kind enough to supervise.

With that background, I thought I would post the PDF of the paper I wrote. I'm not sure if this is the exact paper I submitted, and it certainly includes some typos and, having reread it recently, I can see that my writing needed a bit of work. It is very difficult to decipher some of the content. I suspect I used the most complex symbols and wording possible, but I had slaved through reading similar papers during my research so I must of thought that was the best way to do things.

Without any further ado, please find my paper, Inference of Enumerated Types In Java in PDF format. Note that this paper has not been published in any journal, and has had minimal peer review. It is presented for educational purposes only. However, if you'd like to chat about it, do get in touch.