Monday, January 26, 2009

Divison of Labor??

I am currently reading a really great paper by Dr. Richard Thaler and Dr. Cade Massey entitled "The Loser's Curse: Overconfidence vs. Market Efficiency in the National Football League Draft."  I am not done with it yet, but it is very insightful so far.  (If you're interested, it can be found on here.) 

Similarly, I have not spent much time thinking about this quote (I will post my own thoughts soon), but I wanted to change things up a bit and ask for your opinion first.  Here is the quote from Dr. (presumably) Gary Becker as noted in an article by Dr. (again, presumably) S. Stewart:

"Division of labor strongly attenuates if not eliminates any effects caused by bounded rationality. ... it doesn't matter if 90 percent of people can't do the complex analysis required to calculate probabilities.  The 10 percent of people who can will end up in the jobs where it's required."

So, a proverbial penny for your thoughts??

1 comment:

Susan said...

i agree. why do i need to know how to do standard deviation of portfolio performance? surely, i can hire someone to do it for me? right?