The Voltage Effect

Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics

Published by mheinl on Feb 1, 2022 "Be it a medical breakthrough, a policy initiative, a product innovation, or a social movement, translating an idea into widespread impact depends on one thing only: whether it can be replicated at scale." This is the foundational idea behind John A.

economics.uchicago.edu

5 Vital Signs - The Voltage Effect

1. Inference - unless you can replicate your results at least 3 times over you don’t have evidence
2. Representativeness of the population - if something works for a specific group of people it doesn’t necessarily work for others, are the people within the specific group biased
3. Representativeness of the situation - is the secret sauce the chef or the ingredients?
1. Validity increases if facilitators understand the ‘why's behind the secret sauce
2. Use technology to automate as much of the process as possible
3. What are the non-negotiables and what are the negotiables?
4. Understand spillovers (are there unforeseen effects that will cause damage that pulls down the aim of the solution) and general equilibrium effects (markets will find new equilibriums over time)
5. Marginal cost considerations (are there economies of scale or diseconomies?)