Links for Saturday, March 7, 2009

• The Industry Standard: Interview with Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon – “On the business and education side it’s very much about learning, it’s about in world training, it’s about collaboration. It’s also very much about changing work processes inside of a company, a company or an organization. Depending on who you are and what your interest is, there are many, many different paths that you can take through Second Life.“
• Econ Steve: We Made the Economist – “The work that I did for Professors Duarte, Siegel, and Young made this week’s issue of The Economist. It is so nice to see our work coming to fruition. Just over a year ago, those professors and I were brainstorming about what to do with this data. I proposed Mechanical Turk, and got to work on some Perl scripts.“
• Social Science Research Network: Trust and Credit – “This study considers the impact of trustworthiness on financial markets at the individual transaction level. We employ a natural experiment using the peer-to-peer lending site, Prosper.com. We find that borrowers who are perceived as untrustworthy are economically and significantly less likely to have their loan requests filled, even controlling for physical attractiveness, detailed demographic information, credit profile, income, education, employment and loan-specific information.“