Personalization of prices, and other things, on the web

Elizabeth Dwoskin has the story in the WSJ:
Why You Can’t Trust You’re Getting the Best Deal Online
A Study Finds Discriminatory Pricing on E-Commerce Sites Is More Widespread Than Thought

"The study, by a team of computer scientists at Northeastern University, tracked searches on 16 popular e-commerce sites. Six of those sites used the pricing techniques; none of the sites alerted consumers to that fact.

"Among the study’s findings: Travel-booking sites Cheaptickets and Orbitz charged some users searching hotel rates an average $12 more per night if they weren’t logged into the sites, and Travelocity charged users of Apple Inc. ’s iOS mobile operating system $15 less for hotels than other users.

"Home Depot Inc. shows mobile-device users products that are roughly $100 more expensive than those offered to desktop-computer users. And Expedia and Hotels.com steer users at random to pricier products, the study said.

“In the real world, there are coupons and loyalty cards, and people are fine with that,” said Christo Wilson, an assistant professor at Northeastern who led the research team. “Here, there’s a transparency problem. The algorithms change regularly, so you don’t know if other people are getting the same results.”


Here's the paper that sparked the newspaper story:
Measuring Price Discrimination and Steering on E-commerce Web Sites
by Aniko Hannak, Gary Soeller, David Lazer, Alan Mislove,  and Christo Wilson (all at Northeastern University).

and here's the website of the group: Personalization Research @ Northeastern

Experiments in this life and second life

Here's an experiment done online, back when Second Life looked like it would be big...

Is avatar-to-avatar communication as effective as face-to-face communication? An Ultimatum Game experiment in First and Second Life, Ben Greiner, Mary Caravella, Alvin E. Roth
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Available online 31 January 2014

Abstract: We report results from an Ultimatum Game experiment with and without pre-play communication, conducted both in a real-world experimental laboratory and in the virtual world Second Life. In the laboratory, we replicate previous results that communication increases offers and agreement rates significantly, and more so for face-to-face communication than for text-chat. In Second Life we detect a level shift to more cooperation when there is no communication, either driven by selection on unobservables or environmental effects. The higher cooperativeness in the virtual world lowers the need for additional communication between avatars in order to achieve efficient outcomes. Consistent with this we are not able to detect an effect of allowing avatar-to-avatar communication

Recommender dating site

As is the case with used cars, it may be desirable to buy from someone you know. http://www.jessmeetken.com/ is an internet dating site that works on that principle.

Here's the come-on: 

"Women are in control.

Men are posted by women. If a guy’s here, it’s only because a woman like you thinks he’s boyfriend material.

(Ask your girlfriends to post their best guys.)"

HT: Stephanie Hurder

Ben Edelman, Internet Sheriff

Bloomberg has a long story on Ben Edelman, as he might look to an internet badguy..

Harvard Professor Attacking Google Thrives as Web Sheriff
By John Hechinger  Feb 13, 2014 9:01 PM PT.

Give yourself a treat and read the whole thing. Here are the opening paragraphs:

"Benjamin Edelman knew his way around the Internet’s ethical thickets at an early age. He also knew how to make that knowledge pay.

"As a 19-year-old Harvard sophomore, he earned $400 an hour as an expert witness for the National Football League against unauthorized Web broadcasting. By his senior year, the American Civil Liberties Union enlisted him, at $300 an hour, to oppose the government’s use of information filters in libraries.

"Now on the faculty of Harvard Business School, Edelman epitomizes a new breed of sleuths for hire, enforcing norms of online behavior.

"Edelman is “an astonishing scholar of the Internet,” said Alvin Roth, a Nobel-prize winning economist, who was a mentor and colleague at Harvard Business School. “It’s the Wild West out there, and Ben is the sheriff.”

"Edelman, a 33-year-old associate professor, mixes scholarship, lucrative consulting and a digital version of the 1960s-style activism of his family, including his aunt, Marian Wright Edelman, the civil-rights and children’s advocate. While he ferrets out misdeeds on the Internet, his multiple roles have put his own work under scrutiny.

“The Internet is what we make of it,” said Edelman, who arrived at his Ivy League office in jeans and sneakers this week after commuting by bicycle through Boston’s snowy streets. “We can shape it through diligence, by exposing the folks who are making it less good than it ought to be, like the neighborhood watch, or the busybody neighbor who yells at you when you throw your cigarette butt on the street."

Venture capital looks at the design of marketplaces

Not long ago I had a chance to listen to some interesting presentations at a conference sponsored by Greylock Partners, about businesses that aim to make marketplaces: As Marketplaces Evolve, Greylock Places Its Bets

 Leena Rao writes:
"The idea of marketplaces as a business model for technology startups isn’t new. We saw some marketplaces go belly up in the bubble, and saw a few, like eBay, grow into massive businesses. However, the marketplace model has experienced a renaissance of sorts lately, with companies like Airbnb, Uber and others gaining serious traction and becoming billion-dollar-plus businesses.

Greylock Partners held a conference in mid-November devoted to talking about design, product development, the economics and more around marketplaces, spearheaded in part by the firm’s newest partner and former eBay Motors creator, Simon Rothman.

As part of its new $100 million commitment to investing in marketplaces, Greylock assembled Reid Hoffman, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky, eBay CEOJohn Donahoe, Nobel Prize Laureate and marketplace expert Alvin Roth, and many others to discuss the rise of marketplaces and much more. I was able to sit down with some of the speakers to talk about their thoughts on why marketplaces are hot right now.

Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn and was an early investor in Facebook, sees many parallels between networks and marketplaces. On the similarities in both models, he says: “There’s a question of how do you identify people? What reputational systems underlie it? What kinds of information and signaling? What kind of transactions go public? There’s some differences, too, but it’s essentially a similar brain activity.”

As for why marketplaces are getting more attention now, Hoffman believes that it’s in part due to mobile and the progression in human behavior. “Now everyone is comfortable with the notion of, ‘Oh, I could actually find someone I don’t know and transact with them, either as travelers, hosts, sellers, buyer.’ Those that can actually work mean that I have some trust in these mechanisms,” he explains further.

Rothman agrees with Hoffman, and told me that trust is a huge element of why marketplaces have evolved, as well as the biggest challenge for these marketplaces. “They’re really selling trust. And until the web adds social identity, I think creating trust at scale is really hard. As we’ve heard, marketplace is about influence, and if you can’t control the experience, if you can’t control the product, you can’t control the fulfillment. All you can control is trust and you need to have that. And then mobile is an accelerant to that. If you are a local market, or a local business, you have to have mobile. There’s just no way Uber works without mobile,” he says.

...

So how do marketplaces add trust? Hoffman advises to look at mechanisms by which you can essentially borrow some trust and add it to the product, such as using social networks or identities. He recalled a product development from his PayPal days, where an engineer developed a better way to authenticate bank accounts.

For years, in order to authenticate a bank account you had to send in a voided check, and a copy of your drivers license. PayPal realized that if they wanted to get to scale, the company would have to make it easier to create accounts. “If we can’t solve this problem, we basically don’t have an interesting business model,” he said. One of the early engineers developed a way to send two sub-dollar transactions to the account, to create a PIN of sorts for instant verification.

While friction is something most marketplaces want to remove, Rothman argues that some should consider “the concept of strategic friction” when it comes to trust and safety. He thinks it’s one of the only places where friction is not only tolerable but kind of desirable.

...

"Hoffman says that Airbnb was creating liquidity out of space. Even if the hosts didn’t own their real estate, the liquidity involved is “hugely valuable and motivating to them.” So, they’ll adopt mobile products, and go through hoops to make that happen. “There was no question that this is going to work,” he says. 

...

Now that Greylock is allocating some of its new $1 billion in funding toward the marketplace model, we’ll be looking to see where the firm will be placing its bets. Rothman thinks that in the next five years there will be more $1 billion dollar marketplaces than there were in the past 20 years, and we already have quite a few that are rising fast. Stay tuned."

Design of bitcoin

Here's a nice tutorial by Michael Nielsen on some of the main design elements of the market for bitcoins (and other digital currency): How the Bitcoin protocol actually works

Here is the original bitcoin paper:
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System by Satoshi Nakamoto

Online anonymity, bitcoin, illegal drug markets, and traditional law enforcement

If you were a Silk Road customer, you'll have to find another online drug market: F.B.I. Seizes Silk Road, an Online Drug Market, and Makes Arrest. But it sounds like while the organizer was arrested (after soliciting a murder for hire) the anonymity of transactions may have allowed many of the customers to escape detection.

"The Silk Road marketplace is available through Tor, a popular tool for maintaining anonymity online. Bitcoin, a virtual currency, is used for transactions. The identities of sellers are not known to the buyers. About $1.2 million in sales were conducted a month in early 2012, according to a study by an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Nicolas Christin.

"As part of the investigation into Silk Road, authorities said, they seized 26,000 bitcoins worth $3.6 million.

"The arrest is part of the latest push by federal authorities to police the anonymous marketplaces that have flourished as a result of virtual currencies and software meant to help users browse the Web anonymously. In recent months, federal authorities charged seven people believed to be linked to Liberty Reserve, another virtual currency, which prosecutors described as a $6 billion money-laundering operation that facilitated a black market for everything from stolen identities to child pornography.

"One recent study found that a broad range of drugs, including ecstasy, LSD and heroin, were available on Silk Road, but that marijuana was the most popular item offered for sale. Books and erotica are also sold.

Why it's hard to get hot restaurant reservations or concert tickets (and why concierges sometimes can)

It turns out you need professional gear to get some reservations: the New Statesman has a report from the front.

The Bot Wars: why you can never buy concert tickets online

Enterprising programmers are creating bots that can reserve, and in some cases buy, everything from restaurant tables to eBay goods before humans can even get a look in. Where will the bot wars end?

"Just as high frequency trading, via automated software, took over the financial markets in the early 2000s, the use of bots is a technique that is increasingly coming to dominate online sales of all stripes."
*********
Some of my earlier posts on this subject here,  here and here  focused on concert tickets and professional re-sellers (scalpers) who sometimes skirt the law.


HT: Dean Jens

Recruiting through social networks like LinkedIn

The Washington Post talks about how networking sites like LinkedIn are changing recruiting practices for the already employed: How LinkedIn has changed the way you might get your next job


"As LinkedIn has exploded — perhaps because it has exploded — there has been a major shift in the way employers find new workers. Gone are the days of “post and pray,” a recruiter’s adage for the practice of advertising a job opening and then idly hoping that good candidates swim up to the bait.

"Now the process of talent acquisition is something of a hunt.

“We’re really at a point now where all of your employees are vulnerable to being poached. Every single one,” said Josh Bersin, principal and founder of talent consulting firm Bersin by Deloitte.

"The change is happening rapidly: A 2013 study by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 77 percent of employers are using social networks to recruit, a sharp increase from the 56 percent who reported doing so in 2011. And among the recruiters using social tools, 94 percent said they are using LinkedIn.

"LinkedIn has also shaken up the job candidate experience for workers of all sorts. Satisfied employees in high-demand fields are frequently getting unexpected nibbles to gauge their interest in new opportunities. 
...
"And while LinkedIn has become recruiters’ primary hub for chasing passive talent, it’s not the only place they’re looking: Facebook, Twitter and niche sites such as GitHub have also become channels for identifying prospective job candidates.

...
"About 20,000 clients are using LinkedIn’s talent solutions products. These tools have fast become the company’s financial backbone: Of the $364 million in revenue that LinkedIn reported in the second quarter, $205 million came from this division..."


But success brings congestion:

"Jennifer Boulanger, director of talent acquisition at Arlington-based Opower, said she’s already seeing this happen in certain high-demand job categories.

“Most engineers, they get probably 10 to 15 LinkedIn mails every day,” Boulanger said. “So we actually got away from doing a lot of LinkedIn for engineers.”

"Still, she’s using LinkedIn Recruiter to fill a host of other positions. In fact, she has nearly 11,000 candidates in her applicant tracking system that were identified through this platform..."

Here's a competitor for a niche that may be particularly difficult to search:

"Kathleen Smith of ClearedJobs.net, a career site for people with government security clearances, said that hers is a niche in which many qualified candidates are not easily found on LinkedIn.

 “When you’re talking in the cleared community, people are not very comfortable sharing a lot of information,” Smith said, since they often work on classified projects and are accustomed to maintaining a certain level of privacy about themselves and their work.

"Even some of the basics can be difficult to discern, as workers are typically advised not to disclose in their profiles that they have a security clearance."

The market for integers: Edelman and Schwarz on IP addresses

Pricing and Efficiency in the Market for IP Addresses
Benjamin Edelman , Harvard Business School and Michael Schwarz, Google
June 9, 2013
Abstract
We consider market rules for the transfer of IP addresses, numeric identi fiers required by all  computers connected to the Internet. Excessive fragmentation of IP address blocks causes growth in the Internet's routing table, which is socially costly, so an IP address market should discourage subdividing IP address blocks more than necessary. Yet IP address transfer rules also need to facilitate purchase by the networks that need the addresses most, from the networks that value them least. We propose a market rule that avoids excessive fragmentation while almost achieving social efficiency, and we argue that implementation of this rule is feasible despite the limited powers of central authorities. We also off er a framework for the price trajectory of IP addresses. In a world without uncertainty, the unit price of IP addresses is constant until all addresses are in use and begins to decrease at that time. With uncertainty, the price before that time is a martingale, and the price trajectory afterwards is a supermartingale. Finally, we explore the role of rental markets in sharing information about address value and assuring allocative efficiency

Someone was pretending to be me on Google+ (a story with a happy ending)

The internet is home to a variety of scams, and some of them involve trying to manipulate Google search results. So I was surprised and dismayed, but not entirely shocked, when I noticed that someone was pretending to be me, by establishing a Google+ page for a company called Market Design, whose web page was....this blog.

What could be in it for them?  Well, maybe they were really trying to pretend that by hiring them you were hiring me. But maybe they just were moving up in Google searches through the links that this blog gets.  Here's what you saw if you searched for "market design" on Google:

The first result, on the left, is my blog. But there's an item under it called "Google+ page" and an address, which both link to the spoofer, who is also on the right, with a phone number and a map, and a picture that if you click on it gets you to one of my blog posts.

If you clicked on the link that says Google+ page under the link to my blog, you got to this page, on which my blog URL was clearly displayed as the company web page:

On 4/7/13 I filled out a problem report on the Google+ profile page, and I wrote a review disclaiming any connection between their site and me or my blog...

Apparently Google pays attention to this kind of complaint. When I checked back on 4/9/13 the spoofer was already nowhere to be found.

A recent email confirmed this:

From: Google Maps [mailto:noreply-local-issues@google.com]

Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2013 1:09 PM

To: Roth, Alvin

Subject: Google Maps Problem Report - Action taken

Rudolf Diesel, Niels Bohr and me ("great minds don’t go out of print; they go online.”)

So says Springer, which published my first book: Springer Book Archives Makes Its Debut:

"Chiarcos points to the value of keeping such titles in this archive alive. Among some of the treasures in the collection are Rudolph Diesel’s work on the diesel engine, Niels Bohr’s Über den Bau der Atome, and the first book by Alvin E. Roth, the 2012 Nobel Prize winner in Economic Sciences. After Roth won the Nobel Prize, Chiarcos says Springer received many requests to have his 1979 book translated into multiple languages. However, the book had since been out of print. SBA made it possible to gain access to the book and bring the title back into circulation.

In fact, the accomplished works of more than 200 Nobel Prize winners are now part of SBA to ensure that such seminal works are not lost over time, says Chiarcos. For the Springer product development team, the victories come in all sizes: “During our work on the project, we came to realize that great minds don’t go out of print; they go online.”
***********

In the meantime, I long ago made the book available online myself...(although I guess the URL will change as I complete my electronic move to Stanford...):

Roth, Alvin E. Axiomatic Models of Bargaining, , Springer-Verlag, 1979. 
http://kuznets.fas.harvard.edu/~aroth/Axiomatic_Models_of_Bargaining.pdf

HAL R. VARIAN CHAIR IN INFORMATION ECONOMICS

Berkeley has a great new endowed chair, joint in Economics and the I-School, named for (and partly endowed by) the remarkable Google chief economist and former I-School Dean Hal Varian.

I SCHOOL'S FIRST ENDOWED CHAIR WILL BE THE HAL R. VARIAN CHAIR IN INFORMATION ECONOMICS

Hal R. Varian

More information:

• Hal R. Varian
• The Hewlett Challenge

January 19, 2012

The School of Information is delighted to announce the creation of its first endowed chair, the Hal R. Varian Chair in Information Economics, thanks to a generous gift from Hal R. Varian and matching funds from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
“This is terrific for the school,” said I School Dean AnnaLee Saxenian, “and it’s fitting that the founding dean of the school is endowing its first chair. This will be a wonderful legacy for Hal.”
The Hal R. Varian Chair in Information Economics will fund the work of an eminent faculty member, with a joint appointment in the School of Information and the Department of Economics, whose work involves research and teaching in the area of Information Economics.
“I made this donation to support teaching and research in Information Economics,” explained Varian. “Information is the lifeblood of the economy. Everybody who works in the information field should know something about economics, and every economist should know something about information.”
Varian was the founding dean of the I School (then known as the School of Information Management & Systems) and is now the Chief Economist at Google, where he has been involved in auction design, econometric analysis, finance, corporate strategy, and public policy. He is also a UC Berkeley professor emeritus in business, economics, and information management.
A world-renowned economist, Varian has published numerous papers in economic theory, industrial organization, financial economics, econometrics, and information economics. He is the author of two major economics textbooks and the co-author of a bestselling book on business strategy,Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy. Varian also wrote a monthly column for the New York Times from 2000 to 2007.
“No area of research could be more exigent than the economics of information,” said Carla Hesse, the university’s Dean of Social Sciences. “This is a pathbreaking gift from a pathbreaking scholar.”
Dean Saxenian agreed. “The field of Information Economics is very important for understanding information and information behavior,” she said. “We couldn’t be where we are without a strong foundation in economics.”
The School of Information and the Department of Economics plan to hire a new faculty member by Fall 2013 to fill the endowed chair.
Varian’s gift allows the school to take advantage of a matching gift from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, through the Hewlett Challenge. The Hewlett Challenge is a $110-million challenge grant — the largest gift in the university’s history — to endow a total of 100 new faculty chairs across the university.
“The Hewlett matching grant offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and provided me a strong incentive to make a donation now,” said Varian. With the creation of the Hal R. Varian Chair in Information Economics, the Hewlett Challenge has now funded more than 90 of the 100 professorships and is on target to reach the full 100 soon.
“I have written a couple of papers on the incentive effect of matching grants,” commented Varian, “so in this case, it seems that ‘life imitates art.’”

**************
And here's the ad: you could apply for the position...
HAL R. VARIAN CHAIR IN INFORMATION ECONOMICS

Allocating top level domain names

While I was away, Peter Cramton has been busy with an interesting allocation problem: Update on Applicant Auction Conference.

He also includes the following links:

"To better understand what the Applicant Auction is about please take a look at the following two posts on CircleID:

Making the Most of the Draw: The Applicant Auction Conference

Applicant Auction for Top-Level-Domains: Resolving Contention Fairly, Efficiently, and Transparently

Finally if you want to get into the technical details of bidding incentives and bidding strategy take a look at our research paper on the topic:

Detailed research paper explaining the plan  [Presentation, Short Version]"

The online market for tailors

One of the markets that the internet seems likely to change profoundly is the market for custom clothing. Bloomberg news had a recent report on what looks like it could be a small beginning of a big thing:

"Custom clothing startups J. Hilburn Inc., American Giant andBonobos Inc. are racing to gain share in a U.S. e-commerce market that Forrester Research Inc. estimates will reach $327 billion in 2016, up from $202 billion last year. They’ve won customers and venture backers by cutting stores from the supply chain to ship straight to consumers from the factory, charging lower prices than department stores and eking out higher margins than Amazon.com Inc. , the biggest Web retailer.

“J. Hilburn will sell shirts that are made out of the same fabric mill in Italy that a Zegna would sell at Neiman Marcus for $300,” said Brian O’Malley, a partner at Battery Ventures, an investor in the startup, which has raised a total of about $12 million. “They can sell that same shirt totally custom-made for the customer for less, and do that still with healthy margins because there are a lot less middlemen along the way who need to get paid.”

Internet dating survey

Quantifying the Online-Dating Revolution

"The internet is especially important in “thin” dating markets, those in which people encounter a dearth of potential partners in their daily lives. That helps to explain the same-sex numbers and also why it’s not tech-savvy twentysomethings who make the most use of the internet, for romantic connections, but people in their 30s and 40s—another finding."

The Economics of Spam by Rao and Reiley

In the latest Journal of Economic Perspectives: The Economics of Spam (open access).

Justin M. Rao and David H. Reiley

"We estimate that American firms and consumers experience costs of almost $20 billion annually due to spam. Our figure is more conservative than the $50 billion figure often cited by other authors, and we also note that the figure would be much higher if it were not for private investment in anti-spam technology by firms, which we detail further on. Based on the work of crafty computer scientists who have infiltrated and monitored spammers' activity, we estimate that spammers and spam-advertised merchants collect gross worldwide revenues on the order of $200 million per year. Thus, the "externality ratio" of external costs to internal benefits for spam is around 100:1. In this paper, we start by describing the history of the market for spam, highlighting the strategic cat-and-mouse game between spammers and email providers. We discuss how th e market structure for spamming has evolved from a diffuse network of independent spammers running their own online stores to a highly specialized industry featuring a well-organized network of merchants, spam distributors (botnets), and spammers (or "advertisers"). We then put the spam market's externality ratio of 100 into context by comparing it to other activities with negative externalities. Lastly, we evaluate various policy proposals designed to solve the spam problem, cautioning that these proposals may err in assuming away the spammers' ability to adapt."

Centralized application systems: more consolidation

One of the ways the internet is changing job markets has to do with making it easier to transmit job market materials. (This becomes even more important as the internet makes it easier for job candidates to apply to a larger number of jobs.) Competing services have sprung up to serve this need, and as the market matures we are starting to see some consolidation.

In the humanities, Interfolio seems to be consolidating its position, with a recent endorsement from the Modern Language Association, which will integrate the service with its Job Information List:
 Dossier and Search-Management Services Available through the JIL

"Job seekers will be able to apply for positions directly from advertisements in the JIL by creating a free Interfolio account
...
"All departments that place ads in the 2012–13 JIL will be able to use Interfolio’s suite of online search-management tools, called ByCommittee. ByCommittee provides a single secure Web interface for departments to manage search-committee memberships for multiple searches and to receive candidate applications, dossiers, and other materials."
...
"Letter writers receive requests for letters directly from a candidate’s Interfolio account and submit their letters to Interfolio’s centralized dossier service."
********

In Economics, some preliminary discussions have taken place about the possibility of a similar kind of integration between the job listing service Job Openings for Economists (JOE) and the application-materials aggregator Econjobmarket.org. but it remains for at least another year to see whether these discussions will be fruitful.
********
Previous related posts:
Academic letters of reference;

Consolidation and competition among economics jobs aggregators

Unraveling of tech recruiting

Revenge of the Nerds: Tech Firms Scour College Campuses for Talent


"On college campuses these days, the top nerds are getting a taste of what it's like to be star jocks.

"For Maxwell Hawkins, a computer science and art major at Carnegie Mellon University, the moment came in March. A technology recruiting firm sent him a letter by FedEx urging him to drop out of his junior year and take his talents to work for a start-up.
... "The technology boom has created an acute shortage of engineers and software developers. The industry has responded by taking a page from the playbook of professional sports: identify up and comers early, then roll out the red carpet to lock them up.

"With the social media frenzy in full swing, promising students are now wrestling with decisions about whether to stay in school or turn pro.
...
"The National Basketball Association has a rule called "one and done" that requires players entering the draft to be 19 or have completed their freshman year of college. But some prospective programmers aren't even making it that far.

"Sahil Lavingia was a freshman at the University of Southern California in 2010 when he got an email from Ben Silbermann, chief executive and co-founder of the fast-growing online scrapbook Pinterest. Mr. Silbermann was looking for help building a version of Pinterest for the iPhone and happened upon a data tracking app developed by the self-taught Mr. Lavingia.

"Figuring the young student "seemed like a go-getter," Mr. Silbermann drove up to Berkeley from Silicon Valley to meet Mr. Lavingia, who was coming to the Bay Area for the USC-Berkeley football game. A few days later, Mr. Lavingia had an offer in hand and took a leave from school to take the job.

"Some companies are grabbing talented programmers even before they reach college. Luke Weber taught himself how to design computer games in high school and became one of the most popular contributors to Roblox Corp., a company that lets its subscribers play games developed by its users.

"After graduating, he attended a Roblox conference last June and met the head of the company's marketing department, who asked him if he wanted to shoot some videos to teach people how to make games. The videos turned into a design job, and now Mr. Weber, who has postponed plans to go to college, works three days a week for the company producing games and virtual goods for $25 an hour.

"At 18, he is the youngest employee of the company."

The internet and the market for summer rental housing

Along with all the first order effects of the internet, it has had big effects on small markets, like secondhand books and, it turns out, vacation rentals: The Summer Rental Rat Race.

"as more vacation-home owners have entered the rental business, with help from a growing collection of Web sites that make it easy to post listings, the competition to attract tenants has become fierce.

"“Real estate agents who want to sell you a house will tell you that you can make money off it,” Mr. Johnston said. “Well, I did 20 years ago, but I don’t anymore.”

"There is often money to be made in vacation homes, but as the number of listing services has increased, so have the number of properties posted for rent. For example, HomeAway.com, one of the most popular sites, says it has more than 300,000 rentals worldwide.

"Numbers like that are forcing casual landlords to learn how to make their homes appear higher in search results, to track prices by monitoring their neighbors’ listings, and to deal with customer-service headaches like a negative Yelp-style review from renters.
...
"HomeAway listed 304 homes for rent in the Catskills in 2008; now it has roughly 520 homes available. Along the Jersey Shore over the same time frame, listings increased to 2,200 from about 700; in the Hamptons they jumped to 750 from 270.
...
"HomeAway owns another popular Web site, VRBO, which stands for “vacation rentals by owner.” But at these and other HomeAway sites, homes posted by professional property managers now account for 27 percent of the listings.
...
“We see that as a net benefit for our travelers,” said Jon Gray, HomeAway’s vice president for North America. “It gives more choice to them.”
...
"It also creates more competition for individual homeowners, who themselves have more rental listing services to choose from. The options include global players like HomeAway and FlipKey, which is owned by TripAdvisor, and specialized sites like Gite.com, which lists holiday homes in France."