Venture Capital takes advantage of power-law distribution, should the Department of Defense?
Here is venture investor Steve Kim on data-driven insights from the Venture Stories podcast. We model that 30% of the startups that we invest in […]
economics
SpaceX’s platform-based strategy beats bespoke requirements
Bent Flyvgjberg and Atif Ansar have a new article providing evidence that SpaceX projects outperform historical and contemporary competitors by using a platform approach. The […]
In the economics of acquisition, who is in the best place to make choices?
Economist Arnold Kling recounts an argument from Milton Friedman about whether people make rational decisions on behalf of other people: If you buy a coat […]
Does blackboard economics translate to defense decisions?
Here’s an indication of the kind of thinking that predominated the post-WWII world, as expressed by Alain Enthoven who was ASD Systems Analysis in 1966: […]
GMU Playbook: Reduce risk with modular contracting
In this week’s blog post on Mason GovCon’s acquisition playbook study, we discuss modular contracting for software-intensive systems. The Federal Acquisition Regulation prefers modular contracting […]
Defense decision-making beyond neoclassical economics
Well, in the article I caricatured how economists look at preference. So, let me do it in two stages. First, the way economists usually look […]
Setting a new precedent for pricing defense contracts
When you’re trying to buy a product in the industrial era, most of the cost was in the physical attributes of the thing you’re buying. […]
Important decisions are not made the way economic textbooks teach us
Here’s a nice exchange between Agnes Callard and Russ Roberts on EconTalk. Remember — the defense resource allocation process, the PPBE, was explicitly created on […]