In preparation for my thesis defense, I spend some time to study how to make effective slides, and this website came to my attention:

Presentation Zen

It is painfully amuzing to read the posts, some comments are quite thoughtful too.

In this post, he compares the Evil (Darth) with the Wise (Yoda)

I may post some of my slides here later, time spent on learning presentation skills is time well spent!

- Wisedom is with me, but I am not a PHD yet. 

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I went to Washington DC early this week to participate an NBER conference on Innovation Policy and Economy, there are a lot of government officials participating.  A professor from Northwestern (DANIEL DIERMEIER, he is a great presenter, I liked his slides so much) quoted Rumsfeld’s famous sentence on "known knowns and unknown unknowns".

"Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know." 

That was funny, and is quite true. 

His comment on Iraq’s Mass destruction weapons is also hilarious:

"the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence"

To me, these are very good guidance to research!  In econometrics, known knowns are probably those observables, known unknowns are usually captured by the error term.  The big headache is unknown unknowns which can give us headache of missing variable issues.

The second quote tells us that insignificance of a regression does not mean there is no relationship between the dependent and independent variables.

Oh, here is another one:

"I don’t know what the facts are but somebody’s certainly going to sit down with him and find out what he knows that they may not know, and make sure he knows what they know that he may not know."

Anyone who took a course in game theory should ring a bell here on the definition of common knowledge: I know you know, and you know that I know you know, I know that you know I know you know, … …

Simply hilarious 

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A friend asked about the future of this blog after I leave MIT. 

I’ll try to get the old domain name still working http://mikezhang.com, but I may not have so much freedom to maintain the server any more.

So please change the book mark to  http://mikezhang.com it is fairly simple to remember.

I would imagine posting more interesting ideas in the future.  For now, I need to prepare my thesis defense.

My thesis defense is finally scheduled.  Here is the announcement:

Name: Xiaoquan (Michael) Zhang

Date: May 1, 2006

Time: 2pm- 4pm

Location: E53-301 (Hermann Building – where Dewey Library located)

Title: Tapping into the Pulse of the Market: Essays on Marketing Implications of Information Flows

Committee:

Erik Brynjolfsson, George and Sandi Schussel Professor of Management, Chair

John D.C. Little, Institute Professor

Chrysanthos (Chris) Dellarocas, Assistant Professor of Information Systems

Abstract:

As the Internet continues to penetrate consumer households, online marketing is getting increasingly important for firms. By adapting to online strategies, firms are blessed (or doomed) with a plethora of new business models. The information flows created in the process poses both opportunities and challenges for marketers. On one hand, information flows captured online are usually easier to be stored and processed, thus empowering firms to be better informed about the consumers or the market itself. On the other hand, how to use the information flows to make the correct managerial decisions is still a challenging task for managers and academics alike. My thesis studies the marketing implications of these information flows. Broad as the research question is, I focus on specific market settings. I adopt both analytical and empirical methodologies to study information flows in these markets. Overall, this dissertation concludes that information flows can engender new market mechanisms, can provide valuable information of unobservable market forces, and can be created to improve social welfare.

Essay 1: Innovation Incentives for Information Goods

Digital goods can be reproduced costlessly. Thus a price of zero would be economically-efficient for consumers. However, zero revenues would eliminate the economic incentives for creating such goods in the first place. We develop a novel mechanism which solves this dilemma by decoupling the price of digital goods from the payments to innovators while maintaining budget balance and incentive compatibility. It is not surprising to find that innovation incentives in our mechanism are improved relative to the zero-price approach often favored by content consumers. However, it is surprising to find that the incentives are also substantially better than those provided by the traditional system based on excludability and monopoly pricing which is often favored by content owners.

Essay 2: Edgeworth Cycles in Keyword Auctions

Search engines make a profit by auctioning off advertisement positions through keyword auctions. I examine the strategies taken by the advertisers. A game theoretical model suggests that the equilibrium bids should follow a cyclical pattern— "escalating" phases interconnected by "collapsing" phases — similar to a pattern of "Edgeworth Cycles" that was suggested by Edgeworth in a different context. I empirically test the validity of the theory.

Essay 3: The Lord of the Ratings

Third party reviews play an important role in many contexts where tangible attributes may not be enough to evaluate products or services. In this paper, I examine the impact of professional and amateur reviews on the box office performance of movies. I establish an econometrics framework to control for the interaction between unobservable quality of movies and the word-of-mouth diffusion process. The framework allows me to estimate the residual impact of online amateur reviews on the demand. The results show significant influence of the valence measure (star ratings) of online reviews. Interestingly, the volume measure (propensity to write) is not significant once quality is controlled, and the analysis suggests that the variance measure (disagreement) does not play a big role in the early weeks. The estimated influence of the valence measure implies that a one point increase in the valence measure can be associated with 4%-10% increase in the box office revenues.

An �Essay Class� for LATEX Preparation of MIT Thesis

Xiaoquan (Michael) Zhang

http://mikezhang.com

MIT Sloan School of Management

1 Introduction

I�ll make this a very short (but hopefully very useful) document, to do this, I assume you know the basics of LATEX. You may find many resources on the Internet to learn LATEX. A good place to start is: http://web.mit.edu/olh/Latex/thes-latex.html

From the above website, you know that MIT offers a Template for thesis. The webpage has detailed instructions on obtaining it.

The template is inherited from the common base class �report.cls�. And it generates very elegant outputs to meet the requirements for thesis.

However, the template is written with a book-type thesis in mind, people writing an essay-type thesis may find it difficult to meet their needs. This document, and the companion class is here to rescue.

2 What�s wrong with mitthesis.cls?

Users are assumed to write chapters for this book, so document-wide counters all bear the chapter number.

For example, tables are named like �Table 3.4�, where �3� is the chapter number and �4� is the Table number. Similarly, sections are called �Section 5.2�, where �5� is actually the chapter number. This is ok in a book-type thesis, but does not make much sense in an essay-type thesis.

A second problem is that for each �Essay�, there are some required formats (like the chapter title page) that the class can not address.

A third problem is that the report class can not handle separate chapter bibliography files.

In the essayclass, I address all these problems.

3 Where to start?

First of all, you need to download the mitessay.cls file from my website. You can get the whole package in zipped formats, too. Then you need to follow my instruction below to modify your own chapter/essay files to be included in the main.tex file.

The MIT thesis website mentioned above gives you a lot of information on using the files mitthesis.cls, main.tex, cover.tex, etc. I skip these.

4 Step 1

Open mitessay.cls file with any text file editor, scroll down to change �Michael Zhang� to your own name, and �MIT Sloan School� to your own dept. (Sorry, I was lazy to create a variable to pass along the values. :-p)

Get, from your essays (I assume they are regular LATEX files), the preambles, and put them into the file called custzxq.sty, feel free to delete unnecessary packages already in there. The first package

\usepackage[sectionbib]{chapterbib}

is important, though. You need it to have chapter-specific references.

5 Step 2

Open your chapters, delete all the preambles till the title of the essay.

Do the following for all the essay files: at the beginning of the file, add two lines:

\setcounter{chapter}{1}

\renewcommand{\thechapter}{\arabic{chapter}}

They help to reset the chapter number to be correct if you have Appendices in some of the papers. Change the number {1} to that corresponding to the chapter number. Since report.cls starts the chapters from 0, you need to subtract 1 from your real chapter number. So the example actually shows the modification needed for chapter 2.

Change:

\title{What Ever the Title Your Paper Has}

to

\chap{What Ever the Title Your Paper Has}

That was easy, isn�t it?

Now you need to send some environment variables BEFORE the \chap command.

Here is my list, you can change the text in the brackets.

\abstracts{

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}

\dates{

December, 2004

}

\keywords{

\textbf{Keywords:} some random keywords

}

\notes{

This paper is based on joint work with �

}

\thankyous{

This research has benefited from valuable comments from �

}

6 Step 3

Go to the end of the document, delete: \end{document}. You are all set to compile the files!

7 Conclusion

I introduce a new class for LATEX that provides one quick and dirty way to compile an essay-type thesis. This is done with quick hacks, feel free to modify it anyway you like. I hope this can be useful for other people. It may well save you a few hours (if you are good at LATEX) of time, and use that on your own important work. Enjoy!

Files to Download:

mitessay.tar.gz The file contains everything you need to get started

essayclass.pdf This document in PDF.

main.pdf A sample file created with the mitessay class!

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