#AcademicRunPlaylist - 4/9/24

A selfie of me in front of a swollen stream feeding into the Charles River on a sunny day

Another nice (but busier) day in Boston, another nice day for talks for my #AcademicRunPlaylist!

First was an interesting pair of talks at the Maastricht University Faculty of Law by Daniel Rubinfeld (effects of AI on merger control) and Christof Koolen (interoperability in IoT ecosystems) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpweUtLawnM

Next was an engaging slate of talks also at Maastricht University by Oles Andriychuk (legal pluralism and digital competition law), Rosa Baum (US competition law in digital markets), and Thomas Graf (data, algorithms, and competition law) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGUGubGJrNM

Next was an informative panel on the EU data act at the Digital Markets Research Hub with Inge Graef, Björn Lundqvist, and Martina Eckardt. This is the best explanation/discussion of the act that I've heard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY6NhE0vtuM

Next was a great conversation with Cani Fernandez on computational antitrust in Spain on the CodeX Computational Antitrust Podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHxEV6eAceA

Next was an intriguing discussion with Gurneeta Vasudeva on how public-private collaborations can contribute to socially beneficially innovation on Sekou Bermiss' Lit Review Podcast https://thelitreview.podbean.com/e/the-lit-review-an-amj-podcast-gurneeta-vasudeva-s3e3/

Next was an excellent talk by David Rueda on the relationship between income, perceptions of inequality, and support for redistribution at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Through an ingenious study design, Rueda investigates this important issue and shows the effects of shifting these perceptions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmwHsSQNXeE

Next was a wide-ranging talk by Ronald E. Robertson on disentangling user choice and algorithmic curation in online systems at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. Too many people rely on correlational results to support assertions about the effects of online platforms on information consumption, but Robertson methodically works through different environments and shows that user choice is the primary driver here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTXB5f5tbPs

Next was a nice talk by Banghua Zhu on post-training of LLMs, with a particularly good explanation of RLHF https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPzTLfUPT9M

Last was an incredible talk by Ann Lipton on ESG investing and the social responsibility of business at the College of the Holy Cross. Lipton is one of the top thinkers in this area and it's not hard to see why - starting with a fantastic look at the US history of the corporate form, she then clearly summarizes the shareholder primacy vs. stakeholder theory debate, and finally reviews ESG investing and how current political headwinds make confronting the need to reform corporate law and policy inevitable. I have some small quibbles around the edges here, but this is a can't miss talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV0fSrRv5K4