Six thousand chess players took part in a beauty contest

Researchers from the University of Kassel ran a Beauty Contest experiment among visitors of the ChessBase website. Compared to previous versions of the game run on the internet the chess players don't seem particularly smarter than other types of players (although drawing any rockhard conclusions from comparing between completely different experiments is a bit pointless). The most interesting part of the results is that better chess players - as identified by a higher ELO rating - pick lower, better numbers, although the effect is not particularly big and the grandmasters (n=28) who participated didn't seem to do better than the rest at all.

Revenge and the people who seek it

[T]he punishers reported feeling worse than the non-punishers, but predicted they would have felt even worse had they not been given the opportunity to punish. The non-punishers said they thought they would feel better if they'd had that opportunity for revenge—even though the survey identified them as the happier group.

Monitor on Psychology reviews some recent(ish) studies on revenge.

Secret of Googlenomics

"All of a sudden we realized we were in the auction business."

Wired on Hal Varian's work as Google's Chief Economist.

Monkey cooperation and fairness

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Irrational Everything

Where did he go wrong? Because he did not distinguish between the firms and their 'agents' [their managers]. There is a huge gulf between the companies and their agents. Firms take the long view, while agents have short perspectives and take the short view. The compensation models of the corporation and their agents are different.

Haaretz interviews Daniel Kahneman.

Taxing, a Ritual to Save the Species

The New York Times analyses the biological foundations of taxation.

Herbert Gintis gave 5 stars to: Rationality in Economics

One of my favourite (economics related) rss-feeds is the one bringing all of Herb Gintis' Amazon reviews straight to my Google Reader. Gintis reads a lot and always has an outspoken opinion about what he reads. Here is his take on Vernon Smith's latest book.