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Lynne Kiesling

I'm outta here for a couple of weeks of bicycling! Sunday night we will arrive in Pierre, South Dakota, from whence we bike east along the Missouri River to St. Charles, Missouri. We are biking the first one-third of the Lewis & Clark Trail in reverse, accompanied by their journals and other history-relevant readings. Should be fun!

If you would like to keep up with our journey, I've created a blog, L&C Bike Tour, as our online journal. We will post as often as Internet access permits.

I am also using this trip as an opportunity to raise awareness and funding for the Melanoma International Foundation. The Melanoma International Foundation funds patient assistance programs, providing reassurance and understanding on the journey of having the disease as well as providing free screening and awareness events. They provide education through their professionally moderated forum and helpline. Melanoma can be fatal, especially if not caught early. But there's also a lot of low-hanging fruit in melanoma prevention -- broad-brimmed hats, protective clothing, staying indoors or in the shade during the most intense midday hours.

I am using this bike ride to request pledges and donations to support the excellent and important work of the Melanoma International Foundation. In particular, your pledges here will support the Leroy Coolbreeze Fund at the Melanoma International Foundation.

The Leroy Coolbreeze Fund honors the memory of Ian Copeland, a legendary music agent and bon vivant who brought great joy to many people throughout his too-short life. Along with his brothers Stewart (best known as the drummer in The Police) and Miles (who, among other things, managed The Police and founded IRS Records), Ian brought music into being that changed my life and thrilled me starting in the late 1970s. Their work continues to thrill and excite me to this day. Ian died from melanoma in 2006. My request for your support is a testimony to the value the Copeland family has brought to my life, and the joy I experience daily through listening to and playing the music that they have created.

As my friends and I ride along the Lewis & Clark Trail, please give to this worthy cause. If you can specify the "Leroy Coolbreeze Fund" and "Lynne" in your donation, then the great MIF folks will take it from there, and will know that our Lewis & Clark Trail bike tour is raising your awareness of the importance of melanoma outreach and research, and enabling them to do even more of this important work.

Michael Giberson

*Well, almost real congestion pricing. It may not be the real thing, but it is a reasonable facsimile and a step in the right direction. It is not quite the real thing, because, as I observed last time, the FAA "will not allow airport authorities to charge prices sufficient to balance demand with capacity without regard to allowable costs." The underlying system remains explicitly cost-based ratemaking, only now the FAA is suggesting congested airports squish those costs around into rates that help reduce congestion.

Early reaction from the airline industry accuses the U.S. Department of Transportation of trying to sneak congestion pricing in the back door, and scolds the administration for pursuing the idea despite opposition from the airlines.

"We're concerned that Secretary Peters is still determined to pursue congestion pricing when we thought it was clear the idea of congestion pricing was rejected by the airlines," [International Air Transport Association] spokesman Steve Lott said.

I'm not sure how it could be considered a back door attempt when the FAA itself explicitly raises the issue in their policy document.

The New Jersey Port Authority, which operates the three major New York City area airports as well as two regional airports, was reportedly lukewarm, calling the proposal "small steps ... when dramatic action is needed." Meanwhile, Airport International said, "During 2007, airports in the US recorded their worst ever delays. Over three-quarters of these delays were recorded at the New York airports."

If the New Jersey Port Authority doesn't respond to this opportunity by implementing congestion fees of some sort, I'd encourage congested airports with flights departing into the New York City airports at congested times to consider figuring out the costs to the originating airports from NYC-based delays and reflecting that amount in their NYC-bound flights. (Or, to be fair, to the extent that an airport faces costs due to congestion at another airport, reflect those costs in fees on departing flights to those airports -- but of course over three-quarters of the delays in 2007 were recorded at the New York airports, so you can see where these fees would bite.)

Additional econoblogging of the FAA congestion fee proposal: "Rationales" by Daniel Hall at Common Tragedies and "Yes! FAA proposes regulation to allow congestion pricing"at Evan Sparks’s Aviation Policy Blog.

ADDENDUM: USA Today ran an editorial on the topic of airport delays on December 18 along with commentary from Senator Charles Schumer. USA Today wrote:

In recent months, the Bush administration has advanced several workable responses to JFK's delays, to the jeers of a gaggle of critics — airlines, the authority that runs the New York area airports, and the New York congressional delegation.

One of the most promising ideas is congestion pricing — charging airlines more to use valuable runway space at the busiest hours each day, usually the evening rush. This would push airlines to quit overscheduling at those times and space out flights more evenly through the day.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., argues in the space below that congestion pricing is not viable. How would he know? It's never been tried; foes oppose even a pilot program. Some of the other options Schumer suggests might work over time, but it's folly to pretend they'd do anything before next summer's peak travel period, much less this month's holiday season.

Schumer, in his companion piece, wrote:

Now, the Transportation Department is set to unveil a proposal to cut flights and sell hourly slots to the highest bidder. But auctioning flights would raise fares, limit consumer choice and strike a blow to the economy. It wouldn't shorten the wait at the gates or increase capacity. It would force airlines to pay a premium to fly that will surely be passed on to travelers. And it would reduce options for those flying to small and midsize cities.

Flight rationing, like congestion pricing, is not a viable solution. It is experimental game theory. America's busiest airports should not be the guinea pigs for an ideological solution that has never been tested at any airport, let alone the nation's busiest.

Unfortunately, the FAA is not proposing to auction off take-off and landing slots. (But see this post for more on that provocative idea.) Instead, Schumer likes opening up military air space for civilian air travel, installation of an "air czar" to manage operations in the Northeast, along with improving staffing and technology in air traffic control.

Michael Giberson

The Federal Aviation Administration is proposing to change its policy toward landing fees to "provide greater flexibility to operators of congested airports to use landing fees to provide incentives to air carriers to use the airport at less congested times or to use alternate airports to meet regional air service needs." As explained in the notice issued by the FAA, the proposed policy change will not allow true congestion pricing, because they will not allow airport authorities to charge prices sufficient to balance demand will capacity without regard to "allowable costs of airfield facilities and services." Instead, the FAA is proposing to allow airports to re-shuffle currently allowed costs in ways which reflect congestion at airports.

However, the proposal would clarify existing policy that allows airports to charge "dual element" landing fees. Most airports rely on a single element weight-based landing fee. The notice explains that an airport's fees could be revised to incorporate both a per-operation component and a aircraft weight component "so long as the two-part fee reasonably allocates costs to the appropriate users on a rational and economically justified basis." Such a shift would at the margin tend to promote use of larger aircraft into the airport without any other changes in rates. The FAA said the presence of congestion would be one factor that could be taken into account in revising rates. In particular, the per-operation component of the landing fee should vary according to the times congestion is present, said the FAA, if congestion is used to justify the change in fees.

Any airport can switch to a two-part landing fee. The FAA is proposing two other changes that only congested airports would be permitted to use. One change is a proposed ability to add the costs of facilities under construction into current rates (at present airports are allowed only to charge for facilities in use). The second change would allow airport authorities operating multiple airports to shift some costs from uncongested regional airports into the fees charged by the authorities congestion airports. This second proposed change is subject to several limits generally intended to insure that users of the congested airport can benefit from the shift in traffic expected to follow a shifting in costs.

As the Washington Post reports, not all in the air travel business are happy with the proposal, but that reaction is not a surprise. Here at Knowledge Problem we have long favored the economically-sensible approach of airport congestion pricing. While the proposal may not be pure congestion pricing, it would appear to allow airports to make significant steps in that direction.

The FAA is accepting public comments on the proposal, see the FAA notice for details.

Extra credit topic: Research in networks suggests that congestion rents can in some cases flow to non-congested network elements. Think, for example, of a generator connected to a high demand area by a congested line. Rather than the transmission line capturing all of economic rents, the generator may find it can profitably raise its rates and capture some congestion rents itself. The idea suggest the possibility that airports with departures headed into congested airports might find a way to extract some of the possible rents. Of course, that would require a little strategic sophistication on the part of airport rate authorities, and given the reactions reported in the Post's story it seems that airports are not exactly excited about using the modest amount of rate flexibility they already have.

Michael Giberson

Francisco Torralba, on his EconWeekly blog, writes on Hubs, spokes and flight delays and How to eliminate flight delays, now.

Torralba:

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is bent on fixing flight delays. To that end, the agency proposes to cap traffic at JFK.... Mandatory caps can get the job done, but we would be better served by a cap-and-trade scheme: the FAA should force airlines to buy and sell airport slots in the marketplace.

Torralba argues that while some airport congestion arises from a lack of coordination among carriers, some of it also results from the clustering inherent in the hub-and-spoke style of operations employed by most airlines. He notes that Southwest Airline uses a net rather than hub-and-spoke, and observes that the airports at which Southwest is a dominant carrier show a much higher percentage of on-time flights. A result is that cap-and-trade may impair the ability of airlines to support the current scale of hub-and-spoke systems, and the loss of some associated convenience for passengers.

Of course, if the result is more meaningful airline flight schedules, passengers will likely be much better off overall.

Our previous Knowledge Problem posts on airports, congestion, and the FAA.

Michael Giberson

A New York Times article reports on negotiations initiated by the U.S. Department of Transportation seeking to get airlines to voluntarily give up landing slots at Kennedy Airport, one of the nation’s most congested airports. (Many other stories on this topic are available.)

After a pep talk by the secretary of transportation, Mary E. Peters, and the acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, Bobby Sturgell, the airline executives were taken to separate rooms and brought back one by one to talk to government officials about their schedules.

At some hours, Kennedy has more than 100 scheduled arrivals and departures. The F.A.A. said the airport actually handled 80 or 81 per hour this summer, which is the maximum the Transportation Department wants the airlines to schedule.

The airlines said Kennedy could handle more with better equipment and procedures, and have complained that the department’s target number is too strict. Another problem is that some traffic may migrate to Newark, adding to delays there.

The government is hopeful it can get “voluntary” reductions, which would then be codified into a regulation. If the airlines do not “volunteer,” the government has said it could set quotas and assign slots. But, Ms. Peters said, “We have high hopes for market-based incentives.”

The D.O.T. has said it may order landing fees that vary by the hour as an incentive to move flights to off-peak periods. But Ms. Peters said, “We may very well need scheduling reductions to help solve congestion in the near term.”

… Years-old federal controls on how many planes can use Kennedy ended on Jan. 1. Since then, traffic jumped 20 percent, according to the F.A.A., to 1,200 flights a day from 1,000. In August, it was 1,300 flights a day.

According to the F.A.A., one result is that there are 77.4 delays per 1,000 landings or takeoffs so far this year, continuing a steady rise — there were 20.9 in 2003, 27.5 in 2004, 39.6 in 2005 and 60.4 in 2006.

The meetings did not run smoothly. USA Today: “The government's effort to cut record flight delays at New York got off to a bitter start Tuesday when the airlines' trade organization threatened to challenge new controls in court.” The Cox News Service: “It appears that the federal regulators ‘intend to impose cuts,’ said James May, president of the Air Transport Association, which represents the major carriers. ‘We are unalterably, adamantly opposed to it.’ ”

Economists at the U.S. Department of Justice recently produced a paper advocating the auction of airport take-off and landing slots. Tom Whalen, Dennis W. Carlton, Ken Heyer, and Oliver Richard explain the source of some of the problems and some suggested approaches:

Airlines’ private incentives to schedule flights to serve more destinations and offer passengers more choice in departure times do not take into account the delays that their own flights impose upon other airlines because airlines do not face the proper price incentives to use scarce airport capacity. Consequently, airlines schedule too many flights, generating delays that ripple across the highly integrated airline network and adversely affect all passengers. One approach to solving this problem might be to get the airlines together and have them collectively hammer out a solution. … Such collective decision-making would not necessarily benefit consumers. Indeed, collective decision-making by actual and potential rivals raises serious risks to competition.

The current approach is only slightly more problematic than industry-based collusion – as described above the Transportation Department employs, in essence, a combination of administrative fiat, bureaucratic saber rattling, and moral suasion to extract reluctant corporation compromise. You don’t need a Nobel Prize for mechanism design theory to spot the flaws in this system.

Whalen, et al., write, “Our preferred method to allocate scarce airport capacity is to auction slots for landings and takeoffs by time of day and to convey upon their purchasers well-defined property rights.” The slots would be resalable, so airlines have the flexibility to reorganize their flight schedules to changing demand, and could come with cancellation priorities that would come into play if weather or other conditions temporarily reduced capacity at an airport.

While the airlines oppose administrative cuts, most proposed market-based mechanisms really seem to make them crazy. The Washington Post story this morning quoted airline executives as saying that “congestion pricing and caps will curtail flights to towns and cities served by smaller planes,” and complaining that the government hasn’t done enough to expand capacity through New York airspace and at the Kennedy airport.

Of course the point is that flights are already being curtailed, via congestion that spills over through the air transportation system. Only, in the present system much of the risk and cost is hidden in unrealistic flight schedules that leave travelers guessing rather that made transparent through prices that adequately coordinate consumer preferences and air transportation costs.

The proposal to auction airline takeoff and landing slots has been around for at least since 1982, when “A Combinatorial Auction Mechanism for Airport Time Slot Allocation,” by Stephen Rassenti, Vernon Smith, and R. Bulfin, was published in the Bell Journal of Economics.

Strictly speaking, auction of airline slots could be done airport by airport, and done only for highly congested airports. While such an approach would be simple to implement, it presents bidding challenges to the airline. If the auction for Airport A happens before the auction for Airport B, and the airline wants to fly a route from A to B, it needs to know the price for landing at B before it can submit an efficient bid for a takeoff slot at A. The Rassenti proposal, the first published description of a combinatorial auction, provides a mechanism for addressing these and other complications.

The Washington Post noted, “operations are complicated by the fact that an unusual range of aircraft types use JFK's runways, a mix of small regional jets, medium-size planes and wide-body jets. Smaller planes need more space to take off safely behind larger jets. Properly sequencing those flights during busy periods can be a challenge…” A combinatorial auction is designed to manage these kinds of interacting constraints on the system. It may sound complicated, but remember that airlines have a great deal of experience in using dynamic pricing systems to allocate scarce resources when the object is maximizing ticket revenue paid by consumers. Slot auctions just employ similar tools to induce airlines to better coordinate their use of scarce air travel resources. Yes, consumers traveling through popular airports at popular times will end up paying higher ticket prices, but at the same time they will be more likely to arrive on schedule.

Various proposals for extending and improving upon the ideas developed in the Rassenti article have appeared over the last 25 years – but really, improvement is beside the point, the point is to get started. While airport-by-airport auctions may be the technological equivalent of a barnstormer’s bi-plane, the current administrative jawboning is no more than a hot air balloon.

[HT to the Antitrust & Competition Policy Blog for the link to the Whalen et al. paper.]

Lynne Kiesling

In late June the KP Spouse and I were flying back from the ISNIE conference in Iceland, and we had a lengthy layover at BWI while awaiting our Southwest flight to Midway. Tired after a long flight from Reykjavik, we grabbed a crabcake dinner at the restaurant we knew of, then sauntered down to our gate for two more hours of lounging before departure. We rounded the corner, and couldn't believe what we saw before us: a minimalist, tastefully-decorated wine bar and shop. Could we be hallucinating? Were we so beaten down by the modern travel experience that we created a mirage?

Thankfully, no. It was BWI's outpost of Vino Volo, a relatively new line of airport terminal wine bars. Vino Volo currently has locations in Dulles, Sea-Tac, BWI, Sacramento, and New York's JFK, and they are planning to expand further. They offer a thoughtful selection of wines by the glass, tasting flights, small plate nibbles, and bottles of wine for purchase (which is possible since they are inside of airport security).

Today's Wall Street Journal has an article about Vino Volo (subscription required). The author recounts his experience:

We dropped in at the Vino Volo for lunch a few days ago and plunked ourself down in a modern-looking leather chair with old-fashioned comfort. An eager and vinously informed young woman called Jennifer emerged from the adjacent Vino Volo wine store bearing a menu and a wine list.

In a spirit of earnest inquiry, we ordered several of the small platters. Smoked salmon came as rollups, attractively plated. Duck confit with lentils and a generous sprinkling of cracklings was bathed in a vinaigrette made from Banyuls, a wine of Provence, the same region where duck has been parcooked in its own fat and preserved in this way for centuries. The plate (white china like the others) of cured meats included prosciutto, fennel salami and jambon de Bayonne, with crisp-fried crostini sliced from a good baguette-style loaf and bocconcini, little balls of mozzarella.

The teetotaler could limit herself to this food alone and wash it down with a bottle of sparkling Tau water from Wales. But, once again performing a reportorial service for travelers, I matched these platters with appropriate flights of wines. For the duck, I ordered Shades of White, a trio of glasses, each roughly half full, of Villa Maria Cellar Selection Sauvignon Blanc 2006 from the Central Otago region of New Zealand, and two from California: Terlato Family Vineyard's Russian River Valley Pinot Grigio 2006 and Ferrari-Carano's Alexander Valley 2005 Chardonnay. This adventure in global quaffing cost $10.

The glasses arrived on a silvery tray, atop a sheet of information about the wines. To describe each wine, Vino Volo provides a chart divided into four quadrants -- bright, light, rich and brooding. A black dot shows where the wine falls in the spectrum. Vino Volo pegged the Sauvignon Blanc as bright, the Chardonnay as rich. The Pinot Grigio's dot hovered over the line between bright and light. Next to each chart were tasting notes: The Chardonnay, we were told, has "enticing aromas of dried apricots, papaya and mango...with a toasted-almond finish."

We had a delightful experience at Vino Volo; our server was quite knowledgeable and happy to talk about the wines and Vino Volo's business model. We had one wine with which we are quite familiar, the Sausal Alexander Valley Estate Zinfandel 2003, and a new wine for us, the Borsao Campo de Borja Reserva 2001 from Spain (a blend of garnacha, tempranillo, and cabernet). Each glass came on a coaster with tasting notes; the Sausal notes said "raspberry & spicy clove", among other things, and the Borsao said "cherry pie & vanilla". Both were pretty accurate. The 2x2 taste matrix that they use to describe their wines has compexity on the X axis and fruit on the Y axis, and the four quadrants mentioned above do a nice job of capturing the salient characteristics of the taste, for comparison across wines.

Finally, something to add some pleasure back into air travel ...

Lynne Kiesling

Have you all seen the FlightStats site? It's got loads of travel tools, including a real-time flight tracker. I used it last week to time my trip to the airport to pick Diane up. Highly recommended, particularly in light of the predicted travel delays for the rest of the summer.

Lynne Kiesling

I enjoyed our visit, although I don't think I could have afforded to stay much longer! Even a Swedish gentleman sitting with us at the conference gala dinner said that Swedes think Iceland is expensive, and that's saying something!

This is my favorite picture of downtown Reykjavik (taken from the top of the cathedral), because it shows the variety of colors in the houses:

And this is the fantastically colored water out at Blue Lagoon, a mineral hot spring tourist destination situated adjacent to a geothermal power plant (combining two of my interests!):

The ISNIE conference was also quite interesting, although with fewer electricity papers than in the past. The paper from which I learned the most and that I found the most thought-provoking was "Copyleft Licensing and Software Development" by Alessandra Rossi and Massimo D'Antoni from the University of Siena. They analyze important differences in incentive structure and in reasons to choose the GPL license or the BSD license; the paper draft has more details on the model, the hypotheses, and their insights. Very interesting.

After the cut is a picture and some discussion of the souvenirs I bought from my trip; knitting-related, of course!

Lynne Kiesling

Yes, we finally arrived in Iceland Thursday morning ... not in Chicago fuming (fume? moi?). Strolled around Reykjavik, had a coffee, had lunch at Cafe Victor (which is in an old building in which the King of Denmark used to keep his falcons), which is a place I'd certainly hang out if I lived here. I'm not nearly cool enough to hang in Reykjavik's famed nightlife, so perhaps I wouldn't hang there late in the evening ... but otherwise it'd be great.

The first couple of sessions of the conference and the first plenary (Avinash Dixit of Princeton) were interesting, and I am happily catching up with valued colleagues and making new friends.

It's really freaky to be here on the summer solstice. We went out for drinks after dinner (alcohol is so highly taxed here that I felt like I had to take out a mortgage to get a beer), and were walking back to the hotel at 10:45 PM in bright sunlight. Even with light blocking drapes, our room was flooded with sunlight at 4:30 this morning; thankfully, I remembered to pack the eye masks.

OK, off to work ...

Lynne Kiesling

Yesterday's bad East Coast weather resulted in a ground hold for BWI flights, which resulted in our inbound Southwest flight being over two hours late. Even though I called Icelandair's customer service and had them enter our flight number and expected arrival into our record, they gave our seats away when we didn't show up 90 minutes before the flight's departure time. When we did show up 30 minutes before departure time, they treated us like it was all our fault, didn't offer to help us with accommodations, and did nothing other than put our names on the waitlist for today's flight, which is already oversold.

Then today when I called Icelandair's customer service I was (brusquely) informed that if we cancelled the reservation and just returned to Chicago (I am considering it, because if we don't make it on this flight I miss half of the conference), they would be unable to refund our money, because it's not their fault that we didn't get on the flight. Technically true, but still appallingly bad customer service that leaves a bad taste in my mouth and makes me even less likely to ever visit Iceland. And if I did, I certainly wouldn't fly on Icelandair; I'd fly to England instead and fly Iceland Express from Stansted.

How can this shocking excuse for customer service exist in a modern, information-rich society? The flight status database by airport exists, and airlines can access it in real time. An airline like Icelandair, with only four major entry ports in the US, would be able to offer superior customer service if they enabled their computer system to track the whereabouts of their passengers who are traveling from other airports to connect to them at one of those four ports. But the attitudes of the Icelandair employees, and the disturbingly poor computer technology we saw on display at their counter last night, indicate to me that they care very little about providing good customer service.

Lynne Kiesling

I'm going to spend a couple of days in London on the way home from my conference, and in the course of looking up a shop address I found this fantastic resource: Street Sensation. For many neighborhoods in London, you click on a map and there will be a panning landscape of all of the store fronts on that side of the street.

For example: the south side of Brompton Road, between the Knightsbridge tube station and Harrod's.

Whether you are interested in shopping or just wandering, these maps are fantastic, and a great use of technology. And if you're looking for me Monday morning, I'll be puttering around and running errands on Marylebone High Street.

How cool is that?

Lynne Kiesling

I am playing a little hooky this weekend and going skiing through Monday. In the interim, here are some thought-provoking reads:

This Technology Review article on technological change in small-scale coal gasification that could be done on-site, in the home.

Michael Dell is back in the news today, after taking back the CEO position of his eponymous company. He also recently proposed giving Dell customers an opportunity to choose to donate for tree planting to offset the carbon footprint of the new computer they are buying. Clever.

I'm shocked, shocked to hear that Archer Daniels Midland's (ethanol rent-seekers to the world) quarterly profits rose 20% last quarter. Thanks to Russ Roberts for the link, and the ever-important reference to ADM as the chief bootlegger in Bruce Yandle's bootleggers-and-baptists bandits model of rent seeking. Relatedly, in response to Arnold Kling's question of whether any economists support ethanol subsidies, given that the political gamut of opposition to them runs from Paul Krugman to Jerry Taylor: I know of no economist who supports them. I do not. The only people I know who do support them believe that such subsidies induce technological change, and that such industrial policy is net-net socially beneficial.

Cathy Young's Reason article on fan fiction is an interesting and informative read, although she does not explore the most important economic issue in fan fiction: where does copyright protection begin and end when it comes to characters that authors create? Should J. K. Rowling prevent/be able to prevent fanfic authors from using Harry Potter in their work?

Arnold Kling has a proposed list of foundational libertarian principles, which he offers for comment in the same way that the volunteer organizations that govern the Internet do. Tyler Cowen offers his comments. I will ponder them and may offer my comments upon my return.

Wonderful French chef Joel Robouchon is opening a restaurant in Chicago. I salivate just thinking about it; one of the best meals I've ever had was at one of his bistros (not even the three-star Michelin restaurant) in Paris in 1998. He totally rocks.

Right now Chicago is in the throes of enduring a painful upgrade to the CTA elevated tracks on the north side, including the closure of several stops to build new platforms that are long enough for longer trains and ADA compliant. The CTA is botching several dimensions of project management, leading to a diminution of the sympathy one might have in the face of such a daunting civil engineering task. This week's Time Out Chicago has a series of feature stories on the El and the CTA, touching on several of these issues. Note in particular that they interview transportation experts, including my engineering colleague Joe Schofer.

Outta here! Have a great weekend.

Lynne Kiesling

The KP Dad and I played hooky over the weekend and spent a few days in London. One highlight was a delightful evening with Mr. and Mrs. Seat, down from Edinburgh for the weekend.

2006 marks the 20th anniversary of the first time I set foot in London; it also marks the first time my father has set foot there. Thus I was keen to see how different our reactions to various things would be, given our shared prediliction for Monty Python, P.G. Wodehouse, tea, pubs, and other hallmarks of British culture.

I continue to be amazed at the vibrancy of London culture, particularly given how expensive it is. Lots of new construction and refurbishment of old construction, lots of tourists ... I am as fascinated as I was last year when I visited London's East End and ate well. I remember London as being a bit grim in the mid-80s, with little economic dynamism, even less concept of consumer service, and a pretty backward-looking sense. That's so not true today.

In any case, a good time was had by all. Even at this painful exchange rate.

Lynne Kiesling

This was the view from our cabin "up north" in the Boundary Waters:

We saw lots of loons, otters, beavers, bald eagles, mergansers, etc. We did not see moose, much to our consternation. And we saw canoeists; we four were pretty much the only kayakers in our area. The landscape was beautiful, and we did lots of good paddling -- anywhere from 3 miles/day to 10 miles/day. I also learned how to portage my kayak, which means schlepping your boat and your stuff from lake to lake over land.

A great vacation.

Lynne Kiesling

I am outta here, headed on a week's vacation to the Boundary Waters in Minnesota. No computer, no cell phone reception, so no LK KP. Mike will soldier on here while I'm gone.

But please keep talking! I love seeing the conversation that has started.

TTFN!

Lynne Kiesling

I am in Portland, Oregon, in advance of a meeting with some colleagues from Bonneville and the Pacific Northwest National Lab on a project (more on that as it develops). This is the fourth time I've gotten to come to Portland; every time it's been for work. I really like it. I spent the afternoon puttering around in the Pearl District, a fun and funky neighborhood with art galleries, shopping, and restaurants and coffehouses. But the thing I like most about the Pearl is the architecture; it's an old warehouse neighborhood, and lots of the buildings have been converted to lofts, but the exteriors often retain much of the industrial and commercial history.

When I fly to the Pacific Northwest I often jokingly say that I wish the landscape were colored in the same way as a map, so I could idenfity landmarks more easily! I think we flew over Jackson Hole and the Tetons, which were gorgeous. I was on the left side of the plane, so I got the bird's eye view of Mt. Hood, not the Columbia and north view.

This week is chock full of work and travel, so light posting may be a consequence.

Lynne Kiesling

After flying home from Paris on Monday, I am convinced that the worthless labyrinth that is Charles de Gaulle airport is part of a deliberate French strategy to remove any separation anxiety in those tourists who are unhappy to be leaving France. By the time we got through security, I was downright thrilled to be going home; and this from a person who loves visiting France!

My father has a better, and less cynical, theory: he thinks that CDG was designed by a person who had never set foot in an airport.

It is certainly true that the nature and volume of air travel has changed in the 30+ years since the construction of CDG. But I must observe that good architecture, like good markets, is organic, robust and flexible. CDG always strikes me as an exercise in Cartesian hubris, in which the designers were so enamored with their vision that they ignored the forward-looking question of how useful and beautiful the design is likely to be in 20, 30, 40 years. It's so rigid and maladaptive that the subsequent attempts to renovate it have only created incremental improvement.

Lynne Kiesling

Today the KP Spouse, the KP Dad and I are flying home from Paris, so this the the content du jour ... a fitting glimpse of our weekend activities. I know that the flowers will not yet be out in Chicago, so I will be sad to leave behind scenes like this one from the Palais Royal:

We walked through the Palais Royal on our way to one of my must-go places in Paris: Galerie Vivienne, and more precisely, the tea salon A Priori The and the wine merchant Legrand.

This weekend we also went to Epernay to visit a couple of champagne houses. We started at Castellane, where friends told us to expect a friendly and thorough tour. We were not disappointed. Furthermore, the building is a late-19th century style with glazed insets etc., so the architecture weenie in me was happy too. Then we went to Moet & Chandon, where the atmosphere was glitzier and the marketing budget is huge! But they've also been around for 250 years. This is the Orangerie of the Moet grounds:

I prefer the style of the Castellane tour and the product; Moet is too yeasty for my taste, and you don't get any true sense of the grape flavor like you do in the Castellane brut. But the grounds were lovely.

Lynne Kiesling

Back in Paris after three days in Grenoble working with co-authors C�line and Dean on a very fun experimental project. Grenoble is beautifully situated in a valley between three mountain ranges, and we had a blast. The KP Spouse got to be Nature Boy and do some hiking while we worked, and we had a lot of fun catching up with our friends.

The KP Dad is here now too, for a long weekend. Today I work and send them out on their own on their own recognizance; gives them a good opportunity to work on their French!

In an earlier post on chocolate from Patrick Roger, Coyote from Coyote Blog asks how Patrick Roger compares to Maison du Chocolat in my estimation. Now I've refreshed my memory on MdC, and I can say that both are outstanding. But Patrick Roger is not for the faint-of-heart, while Maison du Chocolat has a wider range to appeal to a wider range of tastes. Patrick Roger is almost entirely dark, dark, dark chocolate, sumptous. He has some chocolate-covered hazelnuts that are outstanding.

But if you are not an afficionado of dark chocolate, I would recommend either Maison du Chocolat or Jean-Paul H�vin. H�vin is very popular here, and has worked with a chef whom I appreciate greatly, Joel Robouchon. I have not yet tried H�vin chocolates, but the queue outside the rue Vavin shop on Saturday morning was impressive. Note that the H�vin shop on rue St. Honor� has a tea room, so it might be a good stop for a chocolat chaud in the afternoon.

Lynne Kiesling

As a hostess gift I took a box of incredible Patrick Roger on the Boulevard St. Germain. This is some of the most amazing chocolate I have ever had in my life (and, as a chocolate connoisseur who lives in the hometown of Vosges Haut Chocolat and consumes it on a regular basis). It's deep, dark, rich, savory, lush, sensual chocolate. My favorite of the assortment was dark chocolate with a dark ganache center with lemon and thyme. Outstanding. Incroyable.

The funniest moment was when my friend's six-year-old daughter took a bit of one and made a horrible face. At that moment it was clear that this was adult chocolate (very adult), so instead she got a milk chocolate ladybug from her mother, who was probably thinking "oh good, more for us!".

I also bought a bar of their plain chocolate from Ghana, 75% cacao content. It's spicy and rich and smooth all at the same time, without a trace of any residual milk or sugar taste. Aaaaaah. They sell "single varietal" chocolate bars from about 12 different country/cacao level formulations. Sadly, but not surprisingly given the artisanal nature of the product, each bar (about the size of a regular Lindt bar) is about 6 Euros (that's almost $9 to me).

I blame La Coquette for my sybaritic consumption and squandering of my meager budget, after her mention of M. Roger:

The chocolate! We're POWERLESS TO RESIST AND THIS REALLY NEEDS TO STOP FOR THE SAKE OF OUR POCKETBOOK AND WAISTLINE, PLEASE.

And it won't get any better when my father arrives next week, and will want to go to Ladur�e to get macaroons to take home to my mother. OK, getting up in the AM and doing yoga as well as a run after work ...

Lynne Kiesling

I visited old friends in Hamburg over the weekend. On Sunday morning we went down to the Fischmarkt, the traditional old fish market in the harbor. Hamburg has a long history of prosperity from the fishing industry and from shipping; it was notably one of the cities with merchant associations most prosperously involved in the Hanseatic League; as the article notes, Hamburg also derived much prosperity from the salt trade:

When a canal was built from near Hamburg to Lubeck the salt trade shifted from the road to the cheaper canal route, and the Hamburg merchants who controlled the canal replaced the Kiel merchants in their position of importance in the salt trade.

The Fischmarkt retains some of the touches of this history of trade, including a fascinating and unusual auction institution that has now become a downright tourist attraction. Here is a picture of a gentleman selling plants at the Fischmarkt:

Notice that he is putting a palm tree in a box. This is how the auction works: the vendor yells out a price, say 20 Euros, and says that the first person to claim the box will get everything that is in the box. So he starts by putting this spindly palm in. But if you are a potential buyer in the crowd, what's your incentive? You have an incentive to be quiet, to hold out until he has either put more plants in the box or put a more valuable plant in the box instead. But if you follow that strategy you run the risk of someone claiming the box before you do; this risk increases with the size of the group at the vendor's stall. Thus it's in the interest of the vendor to be loud and advertise the value of what he's auctioning, even going so far as to downtalk the merchandise of his neighboring stalls. The buyers enter into the live theater of the experience by calling out that the merchandise is crap, it's not worth 20 Euros, get it out of there and put something better in, etc.

Theoretically, this tradition strikes me as a very interesting variation on a Dutch auction, in which the seller lowers the price until a buyer accepts it. In this case, the seller maintains a fixed price, but adds more valuable items to the bundle being purchased at that price.

One of the other stalls was selling smoked eel and other preserved fish, starting from a sheath of wrapping newsprint instead of a box. Same instituion.

I am also deeply intrigued at the fact that this is a tourist attraction for more than just auction theory economist geeks. It's gotta be the interactive live theater quality of the experience. I had a ball. Didn't buy any fish or plants, though, much to the relief of my hosts.

Lynne Kiesling

Ooooooh! If only I were better organized. I am going to visit dear friends in Hamburg this weekend, but if I had paid a lick of attention I would have chosen to be in Paris on Sunday for the kickoff of the 103rd Paris-Roubaix, one of the classic bicycle races in all the world, Paris-Roubaix is famous for the spine-tingling and kidney-jangling variety of terrain, including a famous amount of cobblestones.

In bad condition for the past few years, the Wallers-Arenberg forest stretch cannot be taken this year. Therefore the itinerary will be directed towards the South of Valenciennes, where the riders will discover a brand new cobblestone section, in Aulnoy-lez-Valenciennes, with an uphill climb of 1600 m. The total length of the cobbled sections this year is 54,7 km (51,1 km in 2004).

That's 54.7 km out of a total race length of 259 km; i.e., over 20% of the race will be this nasty stretch of cobblestones.

Now, as someone who until recently was riding a 19-year-old triathlon bike (with first generation index shifting), and has bought an aluminum frame bike, the thought of cobblestones continues to make my sitz bones hurt at the thought. But what fun to watch these great cyclists navigate such difficult terrrain! Dork that I am, I have followed the Paris-Roubaix since I started riding seriously in college, but in with all of the other excitements of this trip it completely escaped my notice.

UPDATE: The American George Hincapie comes in 2nd! A very good showing. I'm off to look for highlights on the sports channels ...

Lynne Kiesling

While browsing last evening after dinner I found this interesting discussion at The Morning News about "the French paradox", largely sparked by the recent publication of Mireille Guiliano's book French Women Don't Get Fat.

It's essentially a panel discussion about differences between French and American eating, fitness, and social habits as they involve food. One of the participants in the discussion is the wonderful Clotilde from Chocolate & Zucchini, a wonderful food blog.

The interesting this is I've been in France a week now, and while I eat pretty well and am very active at home, for some reason I find that I am eating smaller meals here. And I've been mostly cooking for myself, so I can't claim restaurant portions are smaller or any such thing.

Lynne Kiesling

At the south end of the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris there are three stretches of grass. As you would expect with the Cartesian rationality symmetry inherent in French landscaping, the larger rectangle of grass faces the exact middle of the Palace. The two slightly narrower rectangles are the same length as the middle one, and they are the exact distance from the middle one. They face the left-middle and right-middle of the Palace.

The large rectangle in the middle is p�louse interdite, or sitting not allowed, presumably because having people sitting, romping, and frolicking on that grass would ruin the lovely prospect of the Palace from the central south gate of the gardens. The two side rectangles are p�louse authoris�e, or sitting permitted.

Not surprisingly, the grass in the middle rectangle is lovely, wtih no bare spots. The grass on the two adjacent rectangles, though, is trampled and rife with bare spots, particularly after a weekend of lovely weather.

Here's an experiment we could run: keep the central rectangle off limits, and one of the others as it is now, which is open access. On the third rectangle, install a higher (maybe hip-high, but transparent and difficult to vault) fence, hire a guard and a clerk, and charge people for admission to that rectangle. Thus we would incur some costs for defining and enforcing the use rights. But would that rectangle be in better condition than the open access one? Perhaps it would even be in better condition than the off limits one! We could use the profits from the experiment to maintain that rectangle, assuming there would be profits after paying for the fence, the guard and the clerk. That would mean having to consider profit-maximizing pricing.

Just a thought ... I had to entertain myself somehow on my run!

Lynne Kiesling

After work today I went for a run in the Luxembourg Gardens, which is a convenient two-minute jog from my apartment. The experience was different from the last time I did so, which was several years ago. Now only a few locals look at you strangely when you run, and of the 15 or so people who were running there, only about 3-4 of us were noticeably American.

I will say, though, that the locals did look at me strangely when I did several sets of step intervals up and down the staircase adjacent to the Medici fountain.

The Luxembourg Gardens are incredible; very French in their symmetry, architecture, and landscaping, very beautiful, and catering to a range of interests from walking to sitting to tennis to boules/p�tanques. Having the gorgeous Luxembourg Palace there doesn't hurt either.

I count myself very fortunate at home that my regular run/bike is in a place as beautiful as Lincoln Park, looking over Lake Michigan, but I am extremely fortunate to have this be my regular run for the next three weeks.

Lynne Kiesling

Good to be here, although my absentmindedness in leaving home my melatonin has robbed me of what I call "the blissful sleep of the jetlagged." I usually really enjoy the sleep the first couple of nights, but both Saturday and Sunday night saw me awake at 3AM. Hopefully I'll shake it tonight, but I'm not feeling my most alert for the Sup�lec presentation this afternoon.

The folks here at Universit� Paris-Sud have welcomed me very cordially. Should be a good few weeks!

But what fun we had! Museums and sites and sights and food and wine and shopping ... on such a tromp that I did not have even a free waking moment to check my email. Now I wade back into the electricity policy ...

Woo hoo! Vacation was fun, lots of stuff happened here in electricity and oil while I was gone. Lots of catching up ... which I started at 5 this morning. Aaah, jet lag!

GOIN' ON VACATION: My husband and I are attending a friend's wedding in London this coming weekend, and are making a vacation of it. Periodic updates if interesting things happen.