Predictive Analytics
Does this make sense to you? AI in the insurance industry??
January 26, 2019
Businessinsurance.com reported that “Artificial intelligence and other technologies hold great promise for the insurance industry but are not without issues, such as adoption and security…” The January 17, 2019 article entitled “AI holds promise for insurance industry, but with caveats” is based on a “panel of insurance and technology industry executives speaking at the Insurance Information Institute’s Joint Industry Forum in New York” who opined: There are two areas that...
January 26, 2019
Businessinsurance.com reported that “Artificial intelligence and other technologies hold great promise for the insurance industry but are not without issues, such as adoption and security…” The January 17, 2019 article entitled “AI holds promise for insurance industry, but with caveats” is based on a “panel of insurance and technology industry executives speaking at the Insurance Information Institute’s Joint Industry Forum in New York” who opined: There are two areas that...
Damage Caps and Defensive Medicine: Reexamination with Patient‐Level Data
January 25, 2019
Physicians often claim that they practice “defensive medicine,” including ordering extra imaging and laboratory tests, due to fear of malpractice liability. Caps on noneconomic damages are the principal proposed remedy. Do these caps in fact reduce testing, overall health‐care spending, or both? We study the effects of “third‐wave” damage caps, adopted in the 2000s, on specific areas that are expected to be sensitive to med mal risk: imaging rates, cardiac interventions, and lab and radiology...
January 25, 2019
Physicians often claim that they practice “defensive medicine,” including ordering extra imaging and laboratory tests, due to fear of malpractice liability. Caps on noneconomic damages are the principal proposed remedy. Do these caps in fact reduce testing, overall health‐care spending, or both? We study the effects of “third‐wave” damage caps, adopted in the 2000s, on specific areas that are expected to be sensitive to med mal risk: imaging rates, cardiac interventions, and lab and radiology...
Development of a General Legal Confidence Scale: A First Implementation of the Rasch Measurement Model in Empirical Legal Studies
January 20, 2019
Legal capability has long been of evident importance in our understanding of legal problem resolution behavior. Although legal capability remains a contested concept, there is much commonality between specifications. Some aspects are generic, while others—such as legal confidence—are particular to law. Such law‐specific measures as have been developed to date have been developed in an ad‐hoc fashion; with no attempts made to test psychometric properties, using either classical test theory...
January 20, 2019
Legal capability has long been of evident importance in our understanding of legal problem resolution behavior. Although legal capability remains a contested concept, there is much commonality between specifications. Some aspects are generic, while others—such as legal confidence—are particular to law. Such law‐specific measures as have been developed to date have been developed in an ad‐hoc fashion; with no attempts made to test psychometric properties, using either classical test theory...
Chief Justice Robots
January 20, 2019
I have an unusually speculative article -- more futurism than law as such -- coming out in a few months in the Duke Law Journal, called Chief Justice Robots. I'd love to hear what people think. Here are the Introduction and the Conclusion; you can read the full article here: IntroductionHow might artificial intelligence change judging? IBM's Watson can beat the top Jeopardy players in answering English-language factual questions. The Watson Debater project is aimed at creating...
January 20, 2019
I have an unusually speculative article -- more futurism than law as such -- coming out in a few months in the Duke Law Journal, called Chief Justice Robots. I'd love to hear what people think. Here are the Introduction and the Conclusion; you can read the full article here: IntroductionHow might artificial intelligence change judging? IBM's Watson can beat the top Jeopardy players in answering English-language factual questions. The Watson Debater project is aimed at creating...
Why Did People Pay $600 For a Pair of $20 Payless Shoes?
January 6, 2019
The Palessi Luxury Brand Launch Party Here’s what happened. The company took over a former Armani store in Santa Monica California for a weekend in late November 2018. It created a luxury ambiance and stocked the store with the same Payless shoes that sell for $20–$40. It invented an upscale fashion designer called Bruno Palessi, branding the store as a “Palessi” store. (It even created an Instagram account and website for the fake brand). For the Palessi store’s grand opening...
January 6, 2019
The Palessi Luxury Brand Launch Party Here’s what happened. The company took over a former Armani store in Santa Monica California for a weekend in late November 2018. It created a luxury ambiance and stocked the store with the same Payless shoes that sell for $20–$40. It invented an upscale fashion designer called Bruno Palessi, branding the store as a “Palessi” store. (It even created an Instagram account and website for the fake brand). For the Palessi store’s grand opening...
People Aren’t Dumb. The World Is Hard.
January 6, 2019
You wouldn’t think you could win a Nobel Prize for showing that humans tend to make irrational decisions. But that’s what Richard Thaler has done. The founder of behavioral economics describes his unlikely route to success; his reputation for being lazy; and his efforts to fix the world — one nudge at a time. * * * Years ago, Richard Thaler became enthralled with a new line of research about decision-making by the psychologists...
January 6, 2019
You wouldn’t think you could win a Nobel Prize for showing that humans tend to make irrational decisions. But that’s what Richard Thaler has done. The founder of behavioral economics describes his unlikely route to success; his reputation for being lazy; and his efforts to fix the world — one nudge at a time. * * * Years ago, Richard Thaler became enthralled with a new line of research about decision-making by the psychologists...
Why you should treat the tech you use at work like a colleague
January 5, 2019
Imagine your company hires a new employee and then everyone just ignores them, day in and day out, while they sit alone at their desk getting paid to do nothing. This situation actually happens all the time -- when companies invest millions of dollars in new tech tools only to have frustrated employees disregard them, says Nadjia Yousif. In this fun and practical talk, she offers advice on how to better collaborate with the technologies in your workplace -- by treating them like colleagues.
January 5, 2019
Imagine your company hires a new employee and then everyone just ignores them, day in and day out, while they sit alone at their desk getting paid to do nothing. This situation actually happens all the time -- when companies invest millions of dollars in new tech tools only to have frustrated employees disregard them, says Nadjia Yousif. In this fun and practical talk, she offers advice on how to better collaborate with the technologies in your workplace -- by treating them like colleagues.
When and Why Defaults Influence Decisions: A Meta-Analysis of Default Effects
January 3, 2019
When people make decisions with a pre-selected choice option—a “default”—they are more likely to select that option. Because defaults are easy to implement, they constitute one of the most widely employed tools in the choice architecture toolbox. However, to decide when defaults should be used instead of other choice architecture tools, policy-makers must know how effective defaults are, and when and why their effectiveness varies. To answer these questions, we conduct a literature search...
January 3, 2019
When people make decisions with a pre-selected choice option—a “default”—they are more likely to select that option. Because defaults are easy to implement, they constitute one of the most widely employed tools in the choice architecture toolbox. However, to decide when defaults should be used instead of other choice architecture tools, policy-makers must know how effective defaults are, and when and why their effectiveness varies. To answer these questions, we conduct a literature search...
The Sound and Fury of Patent Activity
January 3, 2019
Patent reform is a hotly contested issue, occupying the attention of Congress, the Supreme Court, and many of the most innovative companies in the world. Most of that dispute centers on patent enforcement, and in particular on the role of non-practicing entities (NPEs) or “patent trolls” – companies that don’t themselves make products but sue those that do. To technology companies, NPEs are a drag on innovation, taxing them tens of billions of dollars every year while achieving no social...
January 3, 2019
Patent reform is a hotly contested issue, occupying the attention of Congress, the Supreme Court, and many of the most innovative companies in the world. Most of that dispute centers on patent enforcement, and in particular on the role of non-practicing entities (NPEs) or “patent trolls” – companies that don’t themselves make products but sue those that do. To technology companies, NPEs are a drag on innovation, taxing them tens of billions of dollars every year while achieving no social...
Legal Research Gets Smarter and More Comprehensive in 2018
January 1, 2019
3 Given that it started off with a “robot fight”between two AI-driven legal research products, you knew 2018 was going to be a momentous – and even pugilistic – year for legal research. Not only did research get smarter, thanks to a whole new generation of tools powered by AI and natural language processing, but it also got more expansive, thanks to a momentous project that put all U.S. case law online. On the pugilism front, it was a year in which legal research platforms introduced...
January 1, 2019
3 Given that it started off with a “robot fight”between two AI-driven legal research products, you knew 2018 was going to be a momentous – and even pugilistic – year for legal research. Not only did research get smarter, thanks to a whole new generation of tools powered by AI and natural language processing, but it also got more expansive, thanks to a momentous project that put all U.S. case law online. On the pugilism front, it was a year in which legal research platforms introduced...
