A Thought Experiment on Incentives
Suppose we lived in a world where a huge proportion of the very wealthiest people were highly skilled surgeons. They trained in school for many years and worked long hours, but they also made way more money than most people. Some ornery liberal might say we should put a special tax on surgeons because they’re so rich and greedy. The problem, though, is that a special surgeon tax would discourage people from going into the surgery field. In the next generation, the proportion of people who had the right attributes to be excellent surgeons but chose to do something else instead would rise. Consequently, a lot of surgery would wind up getting done by surgeons who were second-rate. Lives would be lost. Which isn’t to say that surgeons should get off tax free, but clearly there are reasons to keep one’s egalitarian impulses in check.
But of course we don’t live in a world like that. Instead, we live in a world where a huge proportion of the richest people work in the financial services sector. Consequently, it’s a world where at my fifth year reunion this spring a huge proportion of the Harvard class of 2003 was working in finance. But what if the top people didn’t have such strong financial incentives to go into finance. What if we had to put up with second-rate investment bankers and hedge fund managers? Would they . . . cause a huge financial crisis? Ha!
Meanwhile, instead of the current situation where the financial sector — which on some level just seems to be dominated by charlatans trying to trick people into believing they know how to meet the market — actually sucks people with quantitative skills out of science and engineering, we would have a situation where the people with those skills were pushed into doing productive work.
58 Responses to “A Thought Experiment on Incentives”
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September 19th, 2008 at 11:07 am
let’s add another point: when the surgeon completes the surgery, you can pretty much tell right away how sucessful it was.
whereas on wall street, bonuses are handed out based on accounting decisions about how sucessful the “surgery” is going to be regarded in the future (i.e., lots of bonuses were paid based on booked profits that clearly were not accurately marked to market).
September 19th, 2008 at 11:08 am
Exactly!
Especially now when taxes are going to have to be raised to pay for the bailout of this mess. The hedge funds and all the rest need to pay taxes just like those of us middle income folks.
September 19th, 2008 at 11:13 am
Why do you think greed is any more effective in drawing the ablest people into surgery than it has been in the financial sector? There are plenty of lousy surgeons who are in it for the money. And plenty of unnecessary surgery that’s done only because it’s lucrative.
You want the people who are most dedicated to the ideals of a profession to go into that profession. Money can play a secondary motivating role, but it’s less useful than devotees of the Econ 101 toy model of human psychology imagine.
September 19th, 2008 at 11:14 am
“Which Side on You On,” the book by Thomas Gheoghan (sp?) made this point quite well already, think it was written in the early 80s… just fyi.
September 19th, 2008 at 11:15 am
I agree, and as an MIT alumnus I’ve made the same observations. A significant number of my classmates (myself included) have gone into banking and consulting instead of science or traditional engineering, surely to the detriment of those alternatives.
But what’s the answer? Regulate the finance sector to the point where the profits to be made are much slimmer, thereby don’t support such high salaries for junior to mid-level employees? I’m sure I don’t like that as a goal of regulation.
September 19th, 2008 at 11:15 am
Nanananana! A blogger in pajamas writing from his
Mom’s basement is jealous of
the wealth acquired by his peers through sheer
brilliance in their choice of their profession!
September 19th, 2008 at 11:18 am
beat
September 19th, 2008 at 11:18 am
This exact comment was made by Paul Samuelson (or was it some other mainstream economist?) right after the 1987 mini-crash. I recall reading it on Time Magazine, so someone could search.
September 19th, 2008 at 11:19 am
Um, I suggest Matt not get carried away with bashing the financial sector per se. When functioning properly, those companies serve not only a useful, but in fact a vital, set of functions for the economy. And so we should want a fair portion of intelligent, hard-working people with good quantitative skills going to work in the financial sector, because it is indeed an important field for the economy as a whole.
Now to be sure, there is indeed a constant danger of serious shenanigans in the financial sector (which, if you think about it, is actually a byproduct of the vital functions served by the financial sector). But the answer to that problem is not to try to dumb down the people working in finance, but instead to have equally intelligent, hard-working people with good quantitative skills occupying the necessary oversight positions.
And in that sense, Matt’s other post about the nominal overseers not really believing in doing their job is much better taken. But bashing the financial sector per se, and specifically bashing it for attracting good people, is just sophomoric.
September 19th, 2008 at 11:22 am
re: science and engineering, it needs to be said that the exploitive conditions which are the norm in academia probably play as much of a rule as the high payouts in the gambling, er, finance industry.
In other words – you need to be very dedicated to science to survive a Ph.D. and a postdoc, and then, after 9 years or whatever, you may not find a job at all. Academia has its own internal problems to deal with, which are probably more consequential than the pull of the finance industry.
September 19th, 2008 at 11:25 am
But what’s the answer? Regulate the finance sector to the point where the profits to be made are much slimmer, thereby don’t support such high salaries for junior to mid-level employees? I’m sure I don’t like that as a goal of regulation.
On Monday, I started scratching a tick mark into the brick wall behind my desk each time I heard or read the “false dilemma fallacy” committed by someone (online, in print, or on radio or TV) in regard to the current economic crisis.
I’m going to need to stop soon, before I break through the wall into the neighbor’s apartment.
September 19th, 2008 at 11:28 am
I looked up a friend of mine from high school on the internet–we were both class of ‘72, and I hadn’t heard from him since. He was the archetypical science nerd back then, and I found out that he’d had a brilliant career in physics–he was one of the pioneers of something called chaos theory, which I don’t really understand, but which evidently is a big deal. So what happened to him? Back in the early 90’s, he left physics, and started modeling the stock market . . .
September 19th, 2008 at 11:32 am
Same in the legal field. A lot of people who were or could have been good lawyers siphon off into banking because the compensation is so much higher. A lot of other good lawyers help move money from Column A to Column B instead of putting criminals in jail (or keeping innocent people out of it) because of the pay differential. As a result, the “meaningful” government and criminal defense work frequently is done by hacks.
It’s funny. I work for the government in a “lifestyle” state — we actually get a number of very good lawyers because what’s the point of living here if you are working 70 hours a week? But I’ve been told that we’re an anomaly in that regard. Whenever we practice against an out-of-state attorney, there is usually an adjustment period as they figure out that we’re not lazy hacks like they are used to taking on in their own state. It usually takes two bloody noses before they realize that we’re as good or better than the highly-paid white shoe lawyers down the street (indeed, most of us were the highly-paid white shoe lawyers down the street before coming here).
September 19th, 2008 at 11:38 am
Didn’t they do some experiment a few years back where a chimpanzee ‘invested’ in the stock market by throw darts at a board with stocks written on it, and actually performed as well as major Wall Street firms?
As far as I’m concerned, if you’re doing something that a trained chimpanzee could do just as well (i.e. investing money) then you aren’t doing anything useful for society.
September 19th, 2008 at 11:40 am
Medicine is a good parallel here. We need super-expensive surgery about as often as we need Math PhD designed derivatives.
There are countries that don’t have super-expensive surgeons but whose general populations age and prosper right along with the USA. Lowly Costa Rica. Cuba. A smaller sliver of their smaller economic pies go to health care and yet the Medicine outcome is similar to ours.
Similarly, most people need about twenty minutes of investment advice a year. If the widow were offered two or three understandable options about where to invest her pittance, she might not make a billion bucks, but she might make it to 80 without loss of too much dignity. Sober, transparent banking and investing isn’t sexy — think Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life — but it’s useful.
September 19th, 2008 at 11:49 am
By the way, nothing I wrote was meant to defend people who make a living by fooling individual investors into thinking they will be able to beat the market, which is indeed a scam. But that is far from all there is to the financial sector.
September 19th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
We have too many people in finance, causing the smartest people to go there, rather than, say, designing the brakes on your car.
The situation with surgery isn’t that dissimilar: the compensation from being a surgeon is so high that it basically causes any medical student with the most basic financial acumen to look in that direction rather than doing internal medicine or infectious diseases. And in some surgical fields, there are considered to be too many surgeons.
It would be nice if sticking with science or engineering resulted in only a marginally smaller salary than finance, but the facts are that finance will give you an order of magnitude larger salary. If the financial sector was properly regulated, then the only people who would be hurt by financial screwups would be the people directly involved in exotic financial instruments, and the widows and orphans would be insulated from these sorts of upheavels.
I seriously don’t blame people that go into finance: this is the sort of thing that the US economy decided to focus on and decided to compensate the most highly, and unlike surgery, does not force people to make a 10-year commitment to training in the field while they’re still in their early 20s. In a country where many regions have a high cost of living and your position in the middle class can be quite tenuous, what do you expect them to do with their lives?
September 19th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
Well, if the wealtyhiest people were all surgeons I would suspect that (1) way too much surgery was being done, (2) the supply of surgeons was being limited artifically, and/or (3) government medical payments and insurance reimbursemenrts for surgery were way out of whack.
And can the shit about “the top people” and Harvard. Look it’s a wonderful school. I in fact have a doctorate from it. But the notion that what people did in high school — which along with the fact that Daddy, Grandpa etc went there is what determines who gets into Harvard — is somehow the criteria for “top people” is just childish.
September 19th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Yes, if only the financial industry were in the same shape as the health care industry. The state of health care in America is working so well, after all. The fundamentals are strong!
September 19th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
I’d just like to throw out to Harvey Lobster that my time spent getting my PhD in engineering and my subsequent time as a postdoc were hardly exploitive and I didn’t undergo any financial hardship. Of course, I had the luxury of having a non-university postdoc.
I have always felt that it’s strange that people who I don’t consider to really be producing anything of substance (most of those involved in finance, lawyers, some other professions) make a ton more money and get more respect and influence than the people who make our country and world work, the scientists and engineers. When you can’t expect the majority of people involved in the market to even match the market when you take their fees into consideration, it seems nuts. God bless Bogle and Vanguard.
September 19th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
As I understand it, the princple function of the financial industry should be (as far as society as a whole is concerned), pursuit of the most accurate methods of assessing credit risks so that the maximum amount of effective wealth can be created from existing investment capital. The better they are at it (or think they are) the more they leverage investments. Their reward for this is a cut of the take. The problem is that the individuals with these companies have great financial incentive to overestimate their ability.
I see no reason why there can’t be strictly enforced leverage limits. We can formulate a rough idea how much leverage they can use before they get into trouble. While some might argue that they are better than the rest and can safely handle higher leverages, we have no way of knowing they are right.
This is no different than putting speed limits on roads. We have a good idea how fast people can safely drive, and know that most people overestimate their capacity. We set the speed limit accordingly, assuming that they will violate the limit to a small extent. People who drive very fast are punished, even if they specifically are capable of handling that speed. Hopefully, if there are no accidents on a stretch of road, the speed limit is raised. If there are many speed related accidents, it is lowered.
Set a leverage limit. If decades pass without a major crisis, or an inordinate amount of little failures, bump the limit up. If crises or unacceptable rates of default continue, tamp it down.
I suppose this could lead to a danger of offshore banks with less restrictive limits outperforming domestic ones. We don’t need to worry about bailing them out, though.
September 19th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
DTM Says:
You are right, of course. And I regretted that comment as soon as I posted it. But it does frustrate me a little bit to compare the PhDs I know and how hard working, brilliant, and down to earth they are to a lot of the people I know who went into finance/banking/law etc and to realize that the latter will, on average, be rewarded much, much more than the former. Not that the latter are a bunch of stiffs or that the former are struggling, just that the rewards for each are so different.
And my comments about promising to beat the market aren’t about snake oil salesmen, they’re about any of the big fund companies or brokerage houses. It’s a fact that index funds outperform something like 75-90% of these people.
September 19th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Investment banking is attractive to recent college graduates because it allows you to make an obscene salary a few years out of school without requiring any actual skills or qualifications besides having a brand-name university on your resume. As such, I don’t think I agree with Matt that it attracts the most talented people – in my experience at least, people of mediocre ability and high status-consciousness become bankers. So maybe the financial industry is actually increasing social welfare by concentrating these people in certain parts of Manhattan where the rest of us can avoid them.
September 19th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Njorl,
I basically agree, and in fact such regulations already exist in some areas. For example, the Basel Capital Accords (and now Basel II) effectively do what you suggest for banks subject to Basel/Basel II by setting various capital and leverage ratio requirements.
lfv,
Perhaps you should reconsider your assumption that people working in the law or finance aren’t doing anything productive. And again, it is a mistake to confuse finance in general with the snake oil salesman promising to help individual investors beat the market.
September 19th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
The solution seems simple. More heavily tax the more speculative and exploitative elements of the financial sector, to reduce the profitability and wages of that game…
…and then funnel that money into primary research and technological research so there’s more science and engineering money and they’re more attractive.
September 19th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Though I could be wrong, id like one example of how higher taxes deter innovation or a person’s desire for wealth. It didn’t seem to hurt innovation in America at any point in our existence.
September 19th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
Njorl,
By the way, there is now a story circulating that the SEC gave out five special exemptions to its ordinary capital requirements in 2004, three of which went to Lehman, Bear Stearns, and Merrill Lynch, allowing those firms to greatly increase their leverage.
So to use your analogy, this would be like the police giving five specific drivers permission to drive at twice the speed limit on the highway, and then three of those drivers ending up causing multiple-car crashes.
lfv,
Holding aside finance, I agree that scientists and engineers often contribute a lot more value to society than they get back in monetary terms, although I think sometimes that is partially explained with nonpecuniary rewards.
Incidentally, I consider most of the actively-managed mutual fund and personal investment advisor industries to be within the category of snake oil salesmen. But that is only one of many facets to the financial world.
September 19th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
“As I understand it, the princple function of the financial industry should be (as far as society as a whole is concerned), pursuit of the most accurate methods of assessing credit risks so that the maximum amount of effective wealth can be created from existing investment capital. The better they are at it (or think they are) the more they leverage investments. Their reward for this is a cut of the take. The problem is that the individuals with these companies have great financial incentive to overestimate their ability.”
The problem with centering investment decisions within a separate independent financial system like ours, however, aren’t small:
1. The investment industry itself will have it’s own internal structures that encourages the industry to focus on some types of investments rather than others irregardless of the benefits to society at large. (for example, focusing on investments that achieve high risky returns over short periods). The society at large, however, may need those other types of investments just as much or possibly more than those particularly useful to making money as a hedge fund manager, venture capitalist, private equity fund partner, real estate developer, etc.
This has been historically a problem several times before – for example, the English investment industry spent the later nineteenth and early twentieth century putting English national capital primarily to work in America and South America, versus using the capital to upgrade the degrading English industrial capital stock. It was easier to have your clients buy Argentine bonds (of which the investors knew nothing, and you the broker could know much more) rather than the factories down the road (which the investors knew much of, and you the broker knew nothing).
2. Society at large is more interested in the synergies between the investments made and how those investments work with the economies’ already in-place institutions. IE, it’s probably more important for the US to have a set of stronger automobile makers than to have another dotcom bubble. But it’s much more useful for an investment industry to have a dotcom bubble, for example (many separate individual vehicles for many different small investment firms to invest in), rather than the auto industry, which only offers two independent firms, both of which really need a huge slug of capital.
September 19th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
That’s right, I knew what DTM was going to post before he did and pre-emptively responded.
September 19th, 2008 at 12:57 pm
A third point is that having an economy heavily focused on capital markets creates a demographic / geographic problem as well: large capital markets exist in only a very few central nodes (New York, Chicago, Tokyo, London, Frankfurt). The geography itself matters – you’re going to end up with a single central city where real estate prices are extraordinarily high and a periphery which is gradually declining to nothing. This is what we see in the case of London and England, for instance. The previous regional centers are all declining to total irrelevance.
But, it’s at least a plausible strategy if your nation’s population is relatively small. It’s a completely implausible strategy when your population is 300 million.
September 19th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
I do so love MY’s assumption that his fellow Harvard grads are by definition the most brilliant and talented people in the nation. There is no justification for this assumption.
To take MY’s highly-compensation-surgeons analogy a little further:
What we’d see in a world where being a surgeon was the absolute most lucrative field in which to work would not be a world where the field of surgery was dominated by the absolute most brilliant and talented people in society. No. Instead we’d see a world where surgery was dominated by the wealthiest and most connected people in society. Yeah, MY’s fellow Harvard grads.
The world of high finance is dominated by Harvard grads and other ivy league-ers not because these are the most brilliant people in society. It’s because, to quote H. I. McDunnough, “this whole thing is just who knows who. Then over here you have favoritism.”
September 19th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
DTM
“Incidentally, I consider most of the actively-managed mutual fund and personal investment advisor industries to be within the category of snake oil salesmen. But that is only one of many facets to the financial world.”
Fair enough. As I’m not involved in this world personally and have no family members in it, I can’t speak to what most of the people are doing, only what I see.
September 19th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
They aren’t all bloggers?
September 19th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
If there is no one trying to beat the market, is there a market? It’s not like you can invest in a GDP index fund.
September 19th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
I’m not sure I buy the assumption here that engineering ought to be the highest and best use of quantitative skills. Sure its important, but as others have said, so is finance.
On the whole, it may be a better use of human capital to outsource engineering work and then attract top talent into finance. After all, if mediocre finance work leads to less efficient capital markets that will act as a drag on GDP growth and contribute to stagnating standards of living for hundreds of millions of Americans.
September 19th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Truly though, come on, what do all these folks in finance and banking contribute to society, besides their taxes? I guess their existence trickles money down to the alcohol and prostitution industries… But is their worth to society really equivalent to the many tens or hundreds or thousands of times more that they’re paid than the average ice cream truck driver, say, who brings joy to so many people?
September 19th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
I am EE MS about 6 months from completing a BME PhD. I went to the Law School career center last week, seeking info on patent attorney salaries.
The starting salary for a big -law IP associate approaches the end-of-career salary for an engineer working in industry. And the time demands on that end-of-career engineer and that first year associate will be similar.
So why the hell would anyone become an engineer? Our society simply does not value science and engineering.
September 19th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
dbr Says:
September 19th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
I’m not sure I buy the assumption here that engineering ought to be the highest and best use of quantitative skills. Sure its important, but as others have said, so is finance.
On the whole, it may be a better use of human capital to outsource engineering work and then attract top talent into finance. After all, if mediocre finance work leads to less efficient capital markets that will act as a drag on GDP growth and contribute to stagnating standards of living for hundreds of millions of Americans.
You’re right. After all, what good did global leadership in technology and research ever do for America? India can come up with the next airplane/computer/internet/medicine/spaceship/etc etc etc. New technologies and manufacturing don’t lead to jobs and GDP growth. Those things haven’t driven our economy for 100 years, it’s been the bankers!
September 19th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
Njorl,
You actually need very few competing arbitrageurs to serve the role of setting efficient prices in the security markets, provided they are well-funded. So, for example, you could have just entities like big endowments, pensions, and the likes of Goldman Sachs serving the arbitrage function, and the rest of us could just invest through index funds.
September 19th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
LB,
Njorl correctly described the core function of the financial sector above. As I would put it, some entities currently have more income than expenditures, and some entities need additional income to fund projects that may generate a return in the future. The essential function of the financial sector is to match up entities in the first category with entities in the second category as efficiently as possible. And that is a very useful thing to have a group of people doing.
September 19th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
You’re right. After all, what good did global leadership in technology and research ever do for America? India can come up with the next airplane/computer/internet/medicine/spaceship/etc etc etc. New technologies and manufacturing don’t lead to jobs and GDP growth. Those things haven’t driven our economy for 100 years, it’s been the bankers!
I didn’t suggest we ought to stop innovating, I just don’t think we should be too quick to judge engineering as obviously noble while banking is obviously parasitic.
I’m just suggesting that If we had a worse financial sector with even more cronyism then the next airplane/computer/internet/medicine/spaceship might not make it to market or get invented at all if the engineer who has the idea isn’t someone’s nephew and can’t get the venture capitalized.
September 19th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Matt’s partly anecdotal argument makes sense only if you assume his reunion anecdote is representative of a larger trend (i.e. that the ‘top people’ go into finance). This, of course, requires us to agree that Harvard grads represent the ‘top people’ as opposed to representing, say, the most ambitious people from the most financially well off and socially connected families who could afford to send their children to private schools and pay for SAT prep classes while driving them to various extra-curricular activities that involve large investments of both time and money… and you get the idea.
I’m willing to bet, however, that a large enough proportion of the world’s most intelligent, hardest working, and most intellectually curious individuals do not go exclusively to ivy league schools and top tier colleges. Moreover, I’d be willing to bet that these people do, in fact, go on to be scientists and doctors precisely because those careers are the most personally rewarding for intelligent, hard working, and intellectually curious people.
In the same vein, I think that careers’ in which the main reward is ridiculous sums of money do not necessarily attract the best and the brightest but rather a cross-section of people who’s primary goal in life is to make lots of money. It could be that many of Matt’s fellow alums fall into this category. Which isn’t to say they aren’t extremely talented and bright, only that they don’t have the market cornered on brains…
September 19th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
I would also argue, as opposed to some of the other commentators here, that investment industry microstructures matter a great deal. There are very wide degrees of separation in how the capital allocation function is done from country to country (and from historic period to historic period within countries), and there are few stunning reasons to prefer our current setup. Japan’s MITI during it’s heyday of 1947-1981 performed quite well, and at a much lower cost for performing the capital allocation function than our current American system costs (MITI staffers were reasonably well-paid as Japanese government officials go, but did a good job for only tiny fractions of what current American financiers cost). The continental European system of large universal banks, while perhaps needing more small venture capital firms at the margins, in general has performed reasonably well. And, again, there too, European universal bankers, while quite well-paid, perform their functions for much less than their American counterparts.
September 19th, 2008 at 9:28 pm
Oh, and just to add to the chorus of people talking about how ridiculous it is to claim the best people go into finance because Matt’s Harvard buddies do: very few top technical people are Ivy league educated. The schools that produce the best are overwhelmingly state universities. UIUC, UCB, UCSD, UCSB, UM, UT, PSU, GT. There’s too many to name, especially when you start talking about specific programs and then even specialties within those programs. Of course places like Stanford, MIT, CMU, and Northwestern also rock the house. The only things the ivies really have are physics and mathematics.
September 19th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
It’s refreshing to here a progressive speak in a libertarian language.
I think Yglesias should be labeled as a libertarian progressive.
September 19th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
The only things the ivies really have are physics and mathematics.
Most of the basic sciences (especially life sciences) at the Ivies are quite good, though that’s because they all generally have very good medical schools attached to them.
From a class point of view, the reason the Ivies don’t have well developed Engineering programs (Princeton being the exception) is because engineering is a middle-class profession. Ivy League schools cater to those seeking upper-middle-class career paths: and that means finance, law, and medicine. I’ve seen more engineers send their children to med school and law school than I’ve seen doctors and laws raise their kids to be engineers. I confess that this model breaks down when you consider the fact that Princeton is certainly the most class-elitist of all the Ivy league schools.
September 19th, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Engineering is a tough career path. In most professions, the older you get, the more you are appreciated for you experience and wisdom.
In contrast, the older engineers get, the more they are looked down upon as out of date.
September 20th, 2008 at 1:45 am
It’s true that the Ivies are strongest in physics and math; that is a point to understand. Few finance quants have degrees in focused applied science fields. It often doesn’t make for a good skills match with the technical stuff that goes on at a quant shop.
Second, there’s a fairly common conflation of quantitatively driven investing with fraudulent business practices here. They may tend to travel together, but they’re not the same (think: Vince Kaminski vs Andy Fastow). I think that MY was referring to the Fastows and the whole aggressive investment crowd, rather than focusing on the math, physics and engineering PhDs in particular.
But whatever precise demographic we’re looking at, the question dbr asks is the crucial one: “if mediocre finance work leads to less efficient capital markets that will act as a drag on GDP growth and contribute to stagnating standards of living for hundreds of millions of Americans.” Well, will it? There’s a feeling that all these finance whizzes indicate less of a race to quality than an arms race. Defusing it might make us all a little better off. (To pursue the surgery analogy, are the finance folks plastic surgeons?) Dean Baker has dusted off an interesting suggestion for a small transactions tax that would discourage rapid-fire trading. For you engineers, that’s a damping term….
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