»Discover Your Inner Economist

In his new book, Tyler Cowen, the author of the Marginal Revolution blog, discusses prizes versus incentives. These are two faces of a mechanism by which the (economic) world goes round: knowing when to apply them makes all the difference, however.
Much of the topical ground in this book resembles

Mr Cowen spoke informally at a brown-bag series today, and spent most of the time speaking about incentives versus grants. He used the X Prize Foundation's prizes for manned stratospheric flight and, more recently, unmanned lunar exploration as examples of how incentives can reward, if not spur, practical innovation. He also mentioned the DARPA Grand Challenge, which has so far failed to produce the desired result: a robot capable of navigating a course from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, and touched on the Netflix Prize to improve the DVD rental recommendations. For all of these, he mentioned the winner's curse: over-investment of resources such as time and money, at the expense of finding the correct solution. A counter-example that he did not mention is Dean Kamen's iBot mobility device (and predecessor to Ginger).

In comics: Hergé penned The Stratoship H.22, a two-part bandes dessines including Mr Pump's Legacy and Destination: New York. This adventure of Jo, Zette, et Jocko centred on a fabulous incentive ($10 million!) for achieving supersonic trans-atlantic flight.

Cowen's book did teach me one useful thing: to abandon enterprises in a short-circuit fashion. That is, don't sit through a boring movie. In this case, don't finish a dull book.