The celebratory tone of the Freakanomics post is also pretty inexplicable. Why is he so happy that one student out of eight bid $0.05, when the model that he’s teaching supposedly predicts that everyone bid $17.50? Either his model is horribly wrong, or the students haven’t learned anything, or both...
He’s aware that the mechanism by which Ashley won (being a lucky liar) is not the reason markets prevent collusion?
Then why is he teaching that as a demonstration of why markets prevent collusion? Kind of a strange way to go about it, don’t you think?
The celebratory tone of the Freakanomics post is also pretty inexplicable. Why is he so happy that one student out of eight bid $0.05, when the model that he’s teaching supposedly predicts that everyone bid $17.50? Either his model is horribly wrong, or the students haven’t learned anything, or both...
Maybe this professor just doesn’t spend much effort on his blog posts. Take a look at http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/why-my-students-dont-get-rebates where he uses the phrase “Pareto improvement” in a completely wrong way. Anyone who doesn’t already know what it means will be misled, and those who do will be confused.