Centives

Interbrand recently released its rankings of the top 100 brands around the world. Some of the interesting features of the list:

• Three of the top five companies have a technological focus.
• All of the top ten are companies based in the United States.
• Toyota and Mercedes-Benz at numbers 11 and 12 are the most valuable non-American brands.
• Sitting at the very top however is Coca Cola, a brand that is estimated to have gained 2% in value in the past year.

To read the entire list click here.

Source: Interbrand

Starbucks has announced that it has started a fund with the goal of spurring job growth in the U.S. The fund is also a part of the Opportunity Finance Network, which provides loans to those people and communities with a lower income. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz says the plan is to provide credit to small businesses seeking to hire more workers. Starbucks is making an initial donation of $5 million to the fund and will be accepting donations both online and at Starbucks stores. What affect this move will have on creating new jobs remains to be seen, but it’s difficult to imagine anything making the current unemployment rate, sitting at about 9.1%, any worse.

Source: Reuters

According to a study by physicists(!) the worst possible way to board a plane is by row number. In fact, it’d be more efficient to let people board the plane randomly. Other highlights from the experimental study include:

• The Window Middle and Aisle technique of boarding where passengers in window seats board first, followed by the middle and aisle passengers was more effective than both the row number technique and the randomized boarding technique.
• In the paper the physicists suggested their own boarding method that maximized the number of people who could use the aisle at the same time. This method turned out to be the fastest way that passengers could board the aircraft.
• How the different boarding times compare with each other depends, in part, on the length of the aircraft with the different methods scaling in different ways.

Source: Experimental Test of Airplane Boarding Methods

Via: Discover Magazine, Marginal Revolution

In the midst of patchy economic growth the sex cell industry is one of the few that is booming. Americans have increasingly turned to donating their sperm and eggs in an attempt to supplement their income in uncertain financial times. Rene Almeling’s book Sex Cells explored the culture and the people within the market. Salon
conducted an interview with her, and some of the highlights of the interview include:

• Sperm clinics recruit donors by advertising it as doing a job. Egg agencies prefer to market the idea of donating as giving a ‘gift’ to another woman who is unable to conceive. Part of the reason maybe procedural. Men have to come to the clinic to contribute many times over a period of a year. Women on the other hand have to go through a lengthy clinical procedure but only donate once. This conception is so deeply ingrained that egg agencies are more likely to reject a woman’s application if they claim that they are in it for anything other than altruism, and are especially likely to frown upon women who claim to do it for the money. Men do not face the same stigma.
• Most sperm banks require donors to be at least 5 feet 8 inches. Women don’t have any comparable height requirement but often have strict weight-height ratios that they must comply with. Men can normally donate into their 40s, women generally have to stop when they hit 30.
• All men are paid the same, but women might earn different rates based on their racial characteristics. There is a shortage of Asian and Black donors and those who come from under-represented cultural groupings might earn a few thousand dollars more than white donars.

Find out more about why egg donors do not think of themselves as mothers, while sperm donors do think of themselves as fathers, and the role that language plays in making people feel comfortable with what they are doing over here.

Source: Salon Read the rest of this entry →

Bank of America will begin charging $5 per month to use their debit cards next year. This new fee is seen as a response to new financial regulations enacted by Congress in response to the financial crisis. This legislation cut the amount of money banks could charge businesses for debit card transactions. Thus, this new fee is an attempt to regain some of the money that will be lost by the banks due to these new restrictions. How consumers will respond to these new fees remains to be seen, and it seems that those in the banking industry are also unsure of what will happen. If your bank decided to charge you $5 per month for using their debit card, would you switch banks?

Source: Washington Post

In India most people know that they shouldn’t drink the water that comes from the taps as it is unlikely to be safe for human consumption. A company called Piramal Water Private Limited decided to come up with a profitable solution to the clean water drinking crisis. The system involves:

• A solar powered ATM that dispenses clean water for ₹0.30 (US$0.60) a liter.
• These ATMs have wireless technology that continuously report the water usage to the company, and allow it to quickly repair any broken machines.
• The company uses a franchise model so that anybody can become a partner, thus spreading clean water throughout the country and improving living standards.

To find out why the water is sold under the brand name Sarvajal as well as to find out how the price of water compares to the income of the average rural Indian click here.

Source: Seattle Weekly

In this post on the Freakonomics blog, the writer takes a look at how much her friend values their friendship based on Radiohead tickets. The band is performing in New York, which will be their first concert in the U.S. in about three years, and tickets were sold out in a matter of minutes. Her friend was one of those fortunate enough to buy a ticket (2 to be exact) and asked her if she would like to go. The author quickly looked at Craigslist to see what some people were willing to pay for these tickets ($400 to $1000 seems to be the average at this point) and then asked her friend what price they would be willing to sell her ticket for. It appears she has a good friend as they stated they would not sell the ticket now that it has been given to her (for face value) but said that if someone was willing to pay $2000, they would consider selling their ticket. Regardless, given the fact that they would not sell the ticket for $1000 (which many tickets are selling for) that means that the value of the friendship is greater than $900 (when you subtract the face value). Clearly this person is both a good friend and a big fan of Radiohead!

Source: Freakonomics blog