Mocking economists is easy sport. They try to predict the future yet missed the 2008 crash, and make bizarre assumptions that cannot hold true. Other offences on the checklist include their narrow academic outlook and lack of exposure to the "real world" of business. The onslaught is common, and hard to refute. But at a turning point the herd tends to be wrong. Economics is evolving, with a mission to solve firms' real-life problems at its heart. Not unusually, the innovation is most obvious-for now-in Silicon Valley. For Bryan Balin of SmarterTravel, a subsidiary of TripAdvisor, a travel website, economics has to be lightning quick. Only 1% of a typical travel site's visitors buy a flight, hotel or holiday before browsing away. Popular vendors can have a lot of viewer flow, but take revenues from only a tiny fraction of them. It is paramount to sift the buying wheat-to be guided as quickly as possible to the product they want-from the window-shopping chaff, who can be bombarded with advertising for other products, lifting the website's profit.
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