Writing
Choose
Startups and Persistence: Soundcloud Launches Premium
Albert Wenger – Mar 30, 2016
At startups events I am often asked about important qualities in the character of founders. Persistence strikes me as crucial. Startups have many setbacks along the way and possibly even near death experiences. Only someone with persistence will be able [...] Read more
Blockchain Technology and Progress in Science
Albert Wenger – Mar 28, 2016
Having recently started to read “Willpower” by Roy Baumeister, I am fascinated with the controversy over the reproducibility of his experiments on ego depletion. This is just the latest example in a longstanding historic problem with reproducibility that impacts the [...] Read more
Insurance Fundamentals (Cont’d): Adverse Selection
Albert Wenger – Mar 25, 2016
In an earlier post in my mini series on insurance fundamentals I explained the concept of moral hazard, which refers to an information asymmetry as having insurance changes unobserved behavior which increases the risk or severity of loss. There is [...] Read more
Insurance Fundamentals (Cont’d): Reinsurance Exercise Explained
Albert Wenger – Mar 23, 2016
So in one of my earlier posts on insurance fundamentals, I included an “exercise for the reader.” The question was to figure out how much money it would cost for the hypothetical insurance scheme in the example to buy re-insurance [...] Read more
Insurance Fundamentals (Cont’d): Moral Hazard
Albert Wenger – Mar 21, 2016
In the previous post in my mini-series on insurance fundamentals I provided a numerical example that has a 1 in 100 probability of a loss of $50. I explained how the fair rate to insure this would be 50 cents, [...] Read more
Machine Creativity: Possibly Sooner than Anticipated
Albert Wenger – Mar 18, 2016
AlphaGo has won its series in the game Go against grandmaster Lee Sedol 4-1. I wrote an initial post about AlphaGo after its first victory against a lesser ranked player. Humans have very big brains compared to the neural networks [...] Read more
Insurance Fundamentals (Cont’d): Numerical Example and Reinsurance
Albert Wenger – Mar 16, 2016
In the two previous posts on insurance fundamentals, I introduced a fundamental inequality relating payouts to premiums and the concept of risk aversion. Today we will look at this through a bit of a numerical example. We will look at [...] Read more
Ziggeo Open Sources Video Player and New Javascript Framework
Albert Wenger – Mar 9, 2016
Video is everywhere these days and for good reason. Even a short video clip contains a lot more information than a still image. But playing back videos in a way that works across browsers and devices has been tricky. Just [...] Read more
Insurance Fundamentals (Cont’d): Risk Aversion aka Concavity
Albert Wenger – Mar 8, 2016
In my first post on insurance principles I introduced the inequality that has to hold for the industry as a whole and also for any one insurance company to stay solvent (yes you can collect interest on premiums, so consider [...] Read more