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[Cameron Laird]

In article <87eky2574t.fsf at pobox.com>, John J. Lee <jjl at pobox.com> wrote:
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>> Complementing that difficulty is the poverty of inference I antici-
>> pate you'll be able to ground on what you find there; their commerce has a lot
>> more noise than signal, as I see it.
>
>What do you mean 'their commerce has more noise than signal'?
>
>
>> 'Twould be great, though, for you to
>> uncover something real.  Good luck.
>
>What I was wondering was where the sales data are going to come from.
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That's a typical part.  As I understand Jenny, she's going
to look at, say, eBay, and correlate "sales" with "price"
and "marketing" variables.  I apologize for being obscure
in abbreviating my judgment that that approach is likely to
yield "more noise than signal"; you're quite right for ask-
ing what I mean.  What I mean by that is that all the 
variables strike me as poorly replicable, in at least three
respects:
A.  eBay and other operators have an interest
    in releasing data only as they support
    their own success, and not for their
    analytic clarity.  Their incentives to
    categorize and aggregate variables can do
    no more than to leave the underlying
    relations unbiased, and that's plenty
    unlikely.
B.  I suspect the universes are so small as
    to provide ittle inferential power.  I'm
    most tentative about this one.  I know
    eBay is big business, but I suspect that
    looking at any other operation will yield
    only data from an exceptional period, be-
    cause the businesses are *not* sustainable.
C.  Measurements of "marketing effort" and 
    "promotion intensity" and other such quali-
    tative notions ... well, it sounds ambitious
    to me.
-- 

Cameron Laird <Cameron at Lairds.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://phaseit.net/claird/home.html