Tuesday, May 31, 2011

The World of Universal Feedback

I was struck by this Nate Silver piece ranking all the major league baseball parks.  It's just part of the new world where we can get feedback on everything, and ranking on everything.  How long will it take for people to start acting on the information?

Some economist, maybe Hayek, observed the market is very good at gathering information, that prices convey reasonably precisely all sorts of information and there's no substitute for it.  That should mean the prices for tickets for the Washington Nationals games should be low, reflecting not only the less than stellar success of the team but also the deficiencies of the ballpark (which may overlap). I doubt the prices do reflect that information.  But the team owners can react to the ratings and improve the ballpark which presumably is much easier to do than improving the team.

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