Some economic sociology at work. "Last offseason Brown brought in a bunch of BCS gurus to Austin to break down how the system works... Brown, and just about everyone else, is scheduling with this in mind." This is a good example of how how models can cause changes in behavior and become an important force that often doesn't get analyzed. This happens elsewhere in competition, too. You build a model that is based on the idea that better teams beat worse teams or something like that, And once you tell someone that they will be ranked this way, it affects their behavior - scheduling and running up the score are probably the two most often mentioned in college football.
You deal with this in investment management every day. You hire an investment manager and then measure their performance against a benchmark - it changes how they invest. They have shifted their focus from wanting to create more money to not wanting to get fired. This usually entails not being in the bottom quartile of their peer group - which means the manager tends to hug the benchmark a lot more than they otherwise would.
The other place where it shows up all the time is when a company decides to use a formula to allocate bonuses. I've seen it in a professional service firm, in particular: if you base it on revenue, then the projects always come in way over-budget. If you base it on project profit, then the project manager inflates it by having his people bill time to projects that are overhead, time-and-expense, or so far over budget that they are going to get ignored.
Why can't you tickle yourself?
Yahoo Answers, you are amazing: "How do i talk to a girl i like? what do I do? what do I say? Additional details: what do i say? how do i talk to her? what do I do?"
Brian Jungen: Strange Comfort: "Jungen charges ordinary, useful objects with layers of meaning, exploring and transgressing the boundaries of what they had been and what they�ve become, riffing on Indian imagery, pop culture, consumerism, and obsession in the process."
Last week I was ran into a professor on my way home and we got into a discussion that involved a fair amount of math. On the walk home I couldn't stop get this ultra-dorky song out of my head.
