...Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game The Oakland A's, under the management of Billy Beane, found a gap in the baseball skills market that existed because most baseball scouts and managers used traditional methods of selecting players that were outdated and had little relationship with skills that brought success to teams. Traditionally, baseball scouts mainly used batting averages (BA) and Runs batted in (RBI) to sign new players. On-base percentage (OBP) was used too, but it was not given as much premium as RBI and BA. Thus, when looking for players, almost all scouts went for players that scored highly on BA and RBI while ignoring those that scored highly on OBP but had low scores in BA and RBI. However, through analysis of massive amounts of data and reading Bill James’ series of baseball books Baseball Abstracts, Beane and his assistant, Paul DePodesta, found that OBP was the most important factor that determined a team’s success and not BA or RBI. Since OBP was not valued highly in players by most baseball scouts, Beane and DePodesta discovered that they could build a successful team of players with high OBP score but whom, because most top baseball teams had ignored them, could be paid much lower salaries than their counterparts could in big teams such as New York Yankees. Therefore, they could create a successful team on a much smaller budget than their competitors. Thus, the opportunity that Oakland A discovered was set up by scouts placing less premium on...
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...Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game Michael Lewis For Billy Fitzgerald I can still hear him shouting at me Lately in a wreck of a Californian ship, one of the passengers fastened a belt about him with two hundred pounds of gold in it, with which he was found afterwards at the bottom. Now, as he was sinking-had he the gold? or the gold him? —John Ruskin, Unto This Last Preface I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it—before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games? For more than a decade the people who run professional baseball have argued that the game was ceasing to be an athletic competition and becoming a financial one. The gap between rich and poor in baseball was far greater than in any other professional sport, and widening rapidly. At the opening of the 2002 season, the richest team, the New York Yankees, had a payroll of $126 million while the two poorest teams, the Oakland A's and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, had payrolls of less than a third of that, about $40 million. A decade before, the highest payroll...
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...In memory of Amos Tversky Contents Introduction Part I. Two Systems 1. The Characters of the Story 2. Attention and Effort 3. The Lazy Controller 4. The Associative Machine 5. Cognitive Ease 6. Norms, Surprises, and Causes 7. A Machine for Jumping to Conclusions 8. How Judgments Happen 9. Answering an Easier Question Part II. Heuristics and Biases 10. The Law of Small Numbers 11. Anchors 12. The Science of Availability 13. Availability, Emotion, and Risk 14. Tom W’s Specialty 15. Linda: Less is More 16. Causes Trump Statistics 17. Regression to the Mean 18. Taming Intuitive Predictions Part III. Overconfidence 19. The Illusion of Understanding 20. The Illusion of Validity 21. Intuitions Vs. Formulas 22. Expert Intuition: When Can We Trust It? 23. The Outside View 24. The Engine of Capitalism Part IV. Choices 25. Bernoulli’s Errors 26. Prospect Theory 27. The Endowment Effect 28. Bad Events 29. The Fourfold Pattern 30. Rare Events 31. Risk Policies 32. Keeping Score 33. Reversals 34. Frames and Reality Part V. Two Selves 35. Two Selves 36. Life as a Story 37. Experienced Well-Being 38. Thinking About Life Conclusions Appendix Uncertainty A: Judgment Under Appendix B: Choices, Values, and Frames Acknowledgments Notes Index Introduction Every author, I suppose, has in mind a setting in which readers of his or her work could benefit from having read it. Mine is the proverbial office watercooler, where opinions are shared and gossip is exchanged. I...
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...4 TH EDITION Managing and Using Information Systems A Strategic Approach KERI E. PEARLSON KP Partners CAROL S. SAUNDERS University of Central Florida JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC. To Yale & Hana To Rusty, Russell &Kristin VICE PRESIDENT & EXECUTIVE PUBLISHER EXECUTIVE EDITOR EDITORIAL ASSISTANT MARKETING MANAGER DESIGN DIRECTOR SENIOR DESIGNER SENIOR PRODUCTION EDITOR SENIOR MEDIA EDITOR PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT SERVICES This book is printed on acid-free paper. Don Fowley Beth Lang Golub Lyle Curry Carly DeCandia Harry Nolan Kevin Murphy Patricia McFadden Lauren Sapira Pine Tree Composition Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, website www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, website www.wiley.com/go/permissions. To order books or for customer service please, call 1-800-CALL WILEY (225-5945)...
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...4 TH EDITION Managing and Using Information Systems A Strategic Approach KERI E. PEARLSON KP Partners CAROL S. SAUNDERS University of Central Florida JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC. To Yale & Hana To Rusty, Russell &Kristin VICE PRESIDENT & EXECUTIVE PUBLISHER EXECUTIVE EDITOR EDITORIAL ASSISTANT MARKETING MANAGER DESIGN DIRECTOR SENIOR DESIGNER SENIOR PRODUCTION EDITOR SENIOR MEDIA EDITOR PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT SERVICES This book is printed on acid-free paper. Don Fowley Beth Lang Golub Lyle Curry Carly DeCandia Harry Nolan Kevin Murphy Patricia McFadden Lauren Sapira Pine Tree Composition Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, website www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, website www.wiley.com/go/permissions. To order books or for customer service please, call 1-800-CALL WILEY (225-5945)...
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...M A G A Z I N E FA L L 2 0 0 2 Volume 20 Number 2 SPANNING THE GLOBE Duke Leads the Way in International Law Teaching and Scholarship inside plus Duke admits smaller, exceptionally well-qualified class Duke’s Global Capital Markets Center to launch new Directors’ Education Institute from the dean Dear Alumni and Friends, It is not possible, these days, for a top law school to be anything other than an international one. At Duke Law, we no longer think of “international” as a separate category. Virtually everything we do has some international dimension, whether it concerns international treaties and protocols, commercial transactions across national borders, international child custody disputes, criminal behavior that violates international human rights law, international sports competitions, global environmental regulation, international terrorism, or any number of other topics. And, of course, there is little that we do at Duke that does not involve scholars and students from other countries, who are entirely integrated with U.S. scholars and students. Students enrolled in our joint JD/LLM program in international and comparative law receive an in-depth education in both the public and private aspects of international and comparative law, enriched by the ubiquitous presence of foreign students; likewise, the foreign lawyers who enroll in our one-year LLM program in American law enroll in the same courses, attend the same conferences...
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...4 TH EDITION Managing and Using Information Systems A Strategic Approach KERI E. PEARLSON KP Partners CAROL S. SAUNDERS University of Central Florida JOHN WILEY & SONS, INC. To Yale & Hana To Rusty, Russell &Kristin VICE PRESIDENT & EXECUTIVE PUBLISHER EXECUTIVE EDITOR EDITORIAL ASSISTANT MARKETING MANAGER DESIGN DIRECTOR SENIOR DESIGNER SENIOR PRODUCTION EDITOR SENIOR MEDIA EDITOR PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT SERVICES Don Fowley Beth Lang Golub Lyle Curry Carly DeCandia Harry Nolan Kevin Murphy Patricia McFadden Lauren Sapira Pine Tree Composition This book is printed on acid-free paper. Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, website www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, website www.wiley.com/go/permissions. To order books or for customer service please...
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...M A G A Z I N E FA L L 2 0 0 2 Volume 20 Number 2 SPANNING THE GLOBE Duke Leads the Way in International Law Teaching and Scholarship inside plus Duke admits smaller, exceptionally well-qualified class Duke’s Global Capital Markets Center to launch new Directors’ Education Institute from the dean Dear Alumni and Friends, It is not possible, these days, for a top law school to be anything other than an international one. At Duke Law, we no longer think of “international” as a separate category. Virtually everything we do has some international dimension, whether it concerns international treaties and protocols, commercial transactions across national borders, international child custody disputes, criminal behavior that violates international human rights law, international sports competitions, global environmental regulation, international terrorism, or any number of other topics. And, of course, there is little that we do at Duke that does not involve scholars and students from other countries, who are entirely integrated with U.S. scholars and students. Students enrolled in our joint JD/LLM program in international and comparative law receive an in-depth education in both the public and private aspects of international and comparative law, enriched by the ubiquitous presence of foreign students; likewise, the foreign lawyers who enroll in our one-year LLM program in American law enroll in the same courses, attend the same conferences...
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