Sowell on Scarcity of Knowledge

"Knowledge is one of the scarcest of all resources in any economy, and the insight distilled from knowledge is scarcer still."
Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics (3rd edition) p. 95

Clash of the Super Retailers

Whenever the question about successful leverage of the Internet is posed, many people think very directly of Amazon, a corporation that started more than a decade ago by selling books over the Internet and has now grown into an true Internet colossus. And this corporation has extended its reach to the extent that it is now better described as a Internet retailer than as a bookshop. So by extending into the sale of clothes, electronics and magazines, Amazon has transcended the conventional description of an Internet bookstore and is more properly a mass retailer.

Amazon's retailing success has attracted the notice of Walmart which intends to contest the retail markets in the US and has started a price war on a number of consumer items. Brad Stone and Stephanie Rosenbloom write about the competition the NYT here, confirming that the two firms are now clearly on each other's radar screen as competitors and have taken the discount fight to a number of high profile books and electronic equipment. This price war has been most intense more recently and the analysts quoted in the story state that it is the case of either meeting its match.

As a student of economics and competition, it is fascinating to me that while Amazon has online retail muscle, in terms of revenues, it is clear that it can maintain the online fight for a long time. I also think that Walmart is probably the only business that could come close to even challenging Amazon in a commercial way. My thinking though is that none of these two will obliterate the other and that Jeff Bezos is probably right that there's enough space for more entrants. It is also clear that that this commercial jostling provides evidence that thee long-held view that physical and Internet stores were different is unravelling. Finally, it is clear that in an open economy, the competitors for any dominant firm can come from any other industry. While this fight is still at its incipient stage, the beneficiaries will be the consumers of the services and students of business who will no doubt be studying this as a case in business class.

Marking Two Decades After the Berlin Wall

Throughout the world, students of history and politics will today muse about the collapse of the Berlin wall and the ultimate collapse of communist rule in eastern Europe. The world will today mark two complete decades since then and a preponderant number of the world's population does not only have an idea about the difference, but many more seem to have forgotten what the age was like. I am unable to recount what it was like principally because I was yet a minor and had not developed an acute sense of what the events meant for human history in addition to the fact that I am not a citizen of Europe.

My ideas about the communist experiment that was undertaken most prominently in eastern Europe come from my reading about a decade ago of two important but nevertheless very different books. My understanding of socialism and its effects on the people who lived under it were was made quite clear by reading the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago. While I had not completely defined a coherent political philosophy then, I concluded that ideology informed the society that did that to other human beings was unacceptable and inhuman. Later, I came to read Friedrich von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and came to understand an argument stating why socialism inevitably leads to the quest to dominate people and to coercion at all costs. Granted that von Hayek makes some bold claims that were not to bee, the general diagnostics and the reason that centralized planning is doomed to failure is stated as clearly as one can demand.

And this brings me to M. Tupy's essay here in which he writes about the meaning of the collapse of communism in eastern Europe. Having lived as a child and seen communism come towards it collapse as predicted by von Hayek, the essay tells stories from a perspective that I rarely encounter. It is pleasing to see that after a few decades of being subjected to life in communist paradise, even those who know no alternative, like Tupy's aunt, understood that the system cannot be good for most.

And so to my mind, one does the cause of human freedom greater service by circulating stories such as Marian Tupy's and Adriana Lukas here that would be recorded by a mere heated debate and vituperation that characterizes most debates about communism. It is just so true that all are deserving of freedom but freedom is not free.

SuperFreakonomics: Guessing Factor X

Leaving aside the controversy that has arisen from the ideas on geoengineering that have been included in the new publication by S.Levitt and S. Dubner, I think that most of the stories and the applications of economics thinking are informative. So while Elizabeth Kolbert has gone at the authors with hammer and tongs, I am convinced that the authors make a simple and correct case by stating the fact that the menu of solutions ought to be expanded beyond the fixation with a reduction in carbon emissions. I still have not made up my mind whether SuperFreakonomics is really better than its predecessor. One only has to make the decision whether it is worthy of spending the cover price on. My view is that it is definitely worthy of the sum since I do not own a Kindle 2 yet.

To my mind, besides annoying the environmental activists who have reduced the issue to a near dogmatic one, the book has also bettered the first by posing a challenge to its readers. The best chapter is the one covering the forensic work conducted by one Ian Horsely and Steven Levitt in trying to identify individuals with connections to terrorism from a data-set of a financial services institution. By describing the variables considered in whittling down the numbers in order to focus on the most likely suspects, it makes the reader really peer into the minds of both men. They go ahead to justify why indicators such as the purchase of life insurance is a valuable one for the algorithm and why other factors are not particularly helpful. Having considered a number of metrics, the authors describe how a certain variable "X" dramatically sharpened the algorithm and led to a group of 30 individuals with a high probability of involvement in terrorist activity.

The only clue offered is that the variable "X" is a qualitative one that measures the intensity of a certain banking activity. I have spent time trying to think about what this variable is and have not convinced myself that I nailed it. As far as trivia go, this is one that would capture the attention of many book clubs. Its only a pity that unlike the trivia questions appearing on the Amazon site, this one cannot be confirmed by the authors. On the other hand, anyone who is bright enough to deduce what it is would probably draw algorithms that would be useful in other ways. So I will keep thinking and will post my guesses here with the reasoning behind it. No terrorists need fear yet!

Will IT Centers Move to Rural India?

India and China are the countries on which forecasters and many other students of economics and development have cast their eyes for the next decade at the least. And to the many who are observing the great development experiment, India is cast as the country whose recent race into high economic growth is based on an services such as software development and business process outsourcing. China's huge advantage in manufactured exports is casually contrasted to India's intermediate dominance in export of services.

A major concern with India's development has been the fact that a large proportion of of its population is rural-based. So the service industries have been based in the main urban centers and therefore provided jobs to a minority of the labor force. Rightly speaking therefore, it is not clear whether India would be able to hinge its development entirely on the technology-driven service industries because they have so far not generated jobs in high quantities. Indeed, Mira Kamdar states in this book, Planet India that India's highly adulated information technology industry employed a mere 1 million people in 2007.

Lydia Polgreeen of the NYT has captured a new trend in India's technology industry. It appears that in the permanent quest for lower cost and the availability of literate people in India's less urbanized regions, firms are establishing offices away from Bangalore and Gurgaon, the traditional technology cities. Given the facts revealed in that story, there is internal competition for the most basic work and this drives the volumes towards the cheaper cities. To my mind therefore, there's anew dynamic in job creation in the technology industry and this will not only intensify competition within India's firms, but deliver greater efficiencies for firms that are outsourcing that work. So while there are no guarantees in development, this new frontier for IT work in India will lift more Indians from poverty.

Google's Dilemma: Buy or Make

Even putting aside the fact that this blog is largely made possible by a facility that Google makes possible, one could still dispassionately say that the corporation's employees are creative and display good business acumen. Reading this story in the NYT about Google's offer to purchase AdMob in exchange for shares worth US$ 750 million got me thinking about business strategy. To start with, it is clear that the Google seeks to expand the range of its revenues into as many personal devices as is possible and that has inevitably led to mobile phones. And so what Google has done is to conduct surveillance of the landscape and determine whether it needed to build a new device or acquire a separate corporation.

From the point of view of one interested in how businesses weigh decisions, I am wondering how these corporations strike a balance between building up a new service from scratch or acquiring a different entity at a fair cost. In the case under discussion, Google's offer is to take over the new corporation through a share swap hence with no cash changing hands. What draws my attention to this is that google will offer more than a million shares at today's price of US$ 566.7 per share in exchange for a corporation as it chases the opportunity to take up some space in the battle for shares in advertisements for mobile phones. Given the large number of engineers that google has, the calculations that inform this acquisition are unclear to me. I suspect that good managers are capable of considering when an acquisition would be a better deal than a complete buildup from scratch. In spite of this, I am intent to watch this transaction keenly as it would be important to se how Google leverages from computers onto the mobile phone advertisement space.

Related to the story of this transaction is the concern that Google is becoming the behemoth of the technology world and its competitors and detractors would like to see its freedom to make acquisitions checked. It is not clear to me that an acquisition of whatever kind would in itself guarantee Google continued dominance and therefore would not be particularly concerned about the quest to expand its footprint in the digital world. As Peter Osnos writes in The Atlantic, recent history suggests that Google is in a stage where it will have to be more careful to prevent overreach and concentrating on innovation.

Why Intel Should Negotiate a Settlement

Few people who watch technology very keenly are unaware that Intel corporation has been facing law suits in relation to its conduct towards PC makers. The variety of technical claims are complicated but in short, they suggest that this corporation has been paying PC makers not to use its competitors chips in their machines. The direct effect of this is that it forestall competition at the assembly stage and thereby harms the consumers of computers. As the story here states,the corporation has defended itself both in the EU and Japan but has faced heavy fines in both jurisdictions. That notwithstanding, the Attorney General of New York has also instituted a lawsuit against Intel on similar grounds.

As would be expected, the story reveals here the ongoing discussion because there are institutions and professionals pitching on both sides on the merits of the case. Judging from the outcome of the cases in both Europe and Japan, I think that the probability of Intel emerging from this case completely unscathed is low. And while I am reluctant to accept that business targets should of necessity be determined by courts, I think that the management and shareholders of the corporation should consider whether a vigorous battle in court is in the corporation's interest.

Again, in spite of my inability to tell fully how the case will be determined and what the size of any fines may be, I consider that Intel should negotiate with the DOJ and New York's AG. The reason for this is that the corporation will remain a strong competitor in the computer chips market and it should preserve its strength and management focus towards that. This view is informed also by the degree of disclosures that have been made about the conduct of the firm's employees which showed that they were aware that some of the business conduct was questionable. Finally, considering that the lawyers are properly schooled in competition law and would represent the firm competently, the history of these actions suggests that the case will probably be long and take up large sums of money.

So the advise is not to cut and run but rather to admit that management's time over the next few years should not be consumed with a trial of this kind. It is clear that in spite of its big fights in the same places, Microsoft did not do any better. Intel's management should show some intelligence here and choose its fights.

Cash for Clunkers Reassessed

Writing this blog post a while back, I stated that the Cash for Clunkers programme was a lesson in applied economics because it revealed that the subsidy itself revealed the preference for car models by Asian manufacturing firms in addition to the fact that the surrendered models were disproportionately those made by US car manufacturers. That blog post was incomplete to the extent that it makes the assumption that the overall programme was otherwise a successful one.

Well, I am now completely chastised, having read from no less than Steven Levitt here, that overall, the cash for clunkers programme was not an unqualified success. Referring to this data based analysis, it is clear the unquestioned attribution the entire set of sales to the programme is incorrect. As he states, there are a large number of acquisitions that would have occurred regardless of the programme. So what happened is that the subsidy merely led to a change in the moment of purchase for the individuals who already made plans to purchase new cars anyway. Taking account of this shift, the Cash for Clunkers programme ends up as a waste of resources.

A Sober Take on Ayn Rand

Among the most difficult things to communicate about popular books is that it is possible for an otherwise average author to tackle a profound subject brilliantly. And so while I define myself as a person who appreciates the profound insights by Ayn Rand, I am often left to wonder whether I read the same books as some of her greatest admirers did. My view of her books is that she writes about very profound matters through impressive characterization but I find her prose style a bit drab. And that does not then mean that her books are unworthy of reading, it is only that perhaps no writer could be gifted with all three qualities. In my view, the story telling is important because some of the most popular of Ayn Rand books are huge tomes and may be especially taxing when the prose is uninviting.

That notwithstanding, I find that Ayn Rand's books and especially the Anthem, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged tackle profound issues that are of significance for those wondering about the organization of society. With this in mind, I agree that some of the most strident arguments against her books are overstated while some of the adherents to her philosophy are equally exaggerators of her writing ability.

Governor Mark Stanford makes the same argument in this piece in the Newsweek Magazine where he starts by saying that he was equally impressed with the weight of the issues that the were covered in Ayn Rand's most popular titles. To my mind, the idea of individual ability and freedom should not be controversial and one that the books have examined in detail. Starting with the appropriate metaphorical ring of Atlas Shrugged, the books by this author address very profound issues regarding individual initiative and freedom as compared to statism and collectivism. I am less convinced of her absolute rejection of the role of government in public affairs but still think that the overall belief in freedom for the individual is an extremely valuable and empirically valid point. So while the Governor indicates that Ayn Rand too exhibited authoritarian traits within the organization that she formed, I respond with the view that this is a an equally profound manifestation of the contradictions of her life without negating the potency of a majority of her ideas.

No Business is Too Special or Too Big To Fail

"It is impossible for regulators to prevent business failure, and undesirable to pursue that objective. The essential dynamic of the market economy is that good businesses succeed and bad ones do not". John Kay

Economics and Vaccination

It is important not to stretch the many uses to which knowledge of economics at any level is useful for policy design. However, as I read this NYT article by Sarah Klein and Phyllis Greenberger, it just occurred to me that economics is more useful and is surely not just about money and aggregates such as the Gross Domestic Product. In their argument, they posit the results of studies stating that there are reasons of biology which makes women and men to require different doses of vaccines in order to achieve the required effect. Because the studies that they cite show that women's bodies are more efficient at generating a protective response from vaccines as compared to men, then this factor should be employed in the analysis of demand for vaccines.

They authors of the article argue eloquently as people with an understanding of human biology and health research but they do make a subtle but interesting economic argument based on optimum use of resources. I see two clear arguments that a student of economics would be impressed by. First is that in light of the fear that the flu vaccine for the H1N1 virus may not be available in quantities to cover everyone who would be most vulnerable, the consideration of the differences in biology are essential in ensuring that the greatest effects emerge from use of a given quantity of vaccine. The second argument is that it may be useful for public health professionals to consider whether the same proportions of men and women should be receiving the vaccines. So given the loud protests from some people who are reluctant to take vaccination, it does matters whether it is a man or woman who opts not to be vaccinated.

McDonald's Pulling Out of Iceland

I have recently had an intense interest in learning to design and test small algorithms that act as predictors of certain events or phenomena. The reason for this is to attempt to see whether through modest number crunching, these models would predict sports, political or business outcomes with any degree of accuracy. Taking forward those assumption, I would have considered that the income levels of a country, the degree of urbanization and locations north of the equator and the structural composition of the GDP would be a crude but passable predictor of the existence of a McDonald's restaurant in any country today. And while trying to be clever, I would not consider the predisposition of a nation's citizens towards the consumption of beef in that model because as I posted here a while ago, there are several McDonald's restaurants in Indian cities where beef is neither easily available nor widely consumed.

I am most surprised by this story in the Guardian that the McDonald's restaurants in Iceland will be closing down in a few weeks in spite of the fact that the country meets most of the criteria that I have enumerated above. The stated reason only makes sense to me by hindsight. It's become far too costly to Icelandic consumers to buy burgers when the Icelandic Kronor has lost value in relation to the Euro. These consumers therefore feel that difference in the cost of their burgers while the franchise loses opportunity for profits.

So There's No Shortage of Engineers in the US

For quite some time now, the unquestioned view has been that the United States does not produce sufficient engineers to match the needs of its private sector. As a result, the reasoning goes, private sector in the US is losing the ability to compete favorably with firms based outside that country. at the same time, the freeze on working visas for professionals from south Asia and other parts of the world due to security concerns has been mentioned as an aggravating factor.

Much as it is with most other policy questions, a study with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation suggests that this contention is popular but largely untrue. As it is summarized in this here, the US does not suffer from an acute shortage in engineers. Instead, there are insufficient incentives within that country for its most qualified minds to go into science, technology and Mathematics (STEM) industry. Most of the best mathematicians are going to work in business consultancy and in the financial services industry.

My perusal of the report shows that STEM qualified graduates are being recruited into jobs that are not categorized as STEM. stated differently, the STEM industry is losing the competition to keep this pool of talent. So just because people are not working in the STEM does not mean that there are no qualified people, it is just that they have far more options and they are taking them. In a manner of speaking, STEM occupations cannot compete for the existing talent. That may still suggest that there is insufficient talent to serve all the purposes for which STEM graduates are in demand.

Finally, I have to read Paul Romer's paper once more to understand what this new information means. Paul Romer's contention then was that the government's technology policy appeared to be subsidizing demand for scientists by the private sector without questioning to what extent that was the most optimal approach. What Sloan study puts to rest is the assertion that US students are not sufficiently motivated to study science and mathematics. So this is one study that Thomas Friedman should review carefully before the 3.0 version of his best-selling book.

China's Ingenious Local Bosses

As a curious watcher of the development experiment going on in China, I have found the ingenuity of its public sector officials quite illuminating. I stated this here on the tendency to introduce rules and regulations without much forethought or careful design. The thought that came to my mind after reading this story in the NYT relates the immense power that local bureaucrats wield in that large country. As the story states, most of these rules are arbitrarily issued by local officials who bear substantial local power and often with very little oversight and external accountability. It is therefore not surprising that the a local official in Huangping has instructed pupils to salute all passing cars while on their way to school.

Notwithstanding the fact that it is possible to ensure traffic safety in other less intrusive ways, the officials who introduced this rule are defending it as a mechanism for instilling good etiquette and for road safety of the school children. I just wonder whether road signs, some speed bumps and training on road safety for kids is insufficient. As various instances of strange regulations show, this state of affairs merely manifest the extreme levels of discretionary powers that local party officials wield. It does not occur to them to consider equally effective and less risible ways for managing public affairs.

This state of affairs is largely consistent with claims stated in a book titled, "Will the Boat Sink the Water?", which I read a couple of months ago. Its metaphorical title aside, its authors have crafted a series of stories illustrating the level of exploitation and harassment of China's peasants in one of its provinces. In all, it tells the state of affairs that many people fail to see when they merely visit Beijing and the main industrial cities. And the poignant question in my mind is that despite the unprecedented successes that China has made, it shows that very tight and accountable authority undermines the development process. Such wide and unaccountable discretion leads to regulatory overreach and silly rules that school kids like to make fun of.

Measuring Absence in Ireland's Civil Service

One can guess that the revelation by the study discussed in this piece in the Irish Times would please the supporters of small government. The argument being that clerical officers in Ireland take an average of 16 days sick leave per year and that is evidence of lower efficiency and a slack attitude to work. Reading further, it is clear that there are variations in the total days taken up for leave. The one factor that I find worthy of examining further is the finding that up to 42% of all absences are not recommended by physicians and that most of the leave days are taken up by clerks in the Irish public service. In addition, the management would be concerned when up to 59% of all employees called in sick in a given year. In honesty, I am not sure what the right proportion should be because that number is probably important when dealing with human resources as the main cost factor.

Rightly, the report recommends that the recording of the absence is important in addition to other factors such as the grades of the employees. In this way then it will be possible to determine whether the rates of absence are too high or not. Still, I am concerned that with an economy that has been quite robust, the fact that the absence rate has moved from 3.3% towards 40% requires a proper answer. Only then would it be possible to make comparisons and determine why the clerical sections are more prone to illness or whether this reflects poor supervision.

Isaac Newton's Chair has New Occupant

I consider A Brief History of Time the one book that many bought, few read to completion and even fewer understood. In spite of all this, it is still a best selling book and one that made many people mildly aware of what black holes are. It was also a fascinating fact that the author held the chair that was occupied by Isaac Newton. His scientific accomplishments aside, Stephen Hawking's life is one to marvel at primarily because his life and the manner in which he has overcome his disability is itself worthy of proper study.

And now that prof Hawking has retired from the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at University of Cambridge, he is succeeded by Prof Michael Green. That the popular publications attempting to make an understanding of particle physics understandable will continue is probably not in doubt. I hope that professor Green will in time try to publish something that takes that tradition forward. My hope is based on my sensible conjecture that it is essential to produce publications that bridge the vast and growing gap between scientific thinkers and the interested laity.

Ambani Brothers Dispute Not For Courts

An article in the Times newspaper here covers the formal commencement of hearings in the legal battle between two brothers representing the most affluent of India's business families. In spite of this being described as a business dispute about the agreed price for sale of energy by one side of the firm to the other, I am skeptical that this is really a matter for the courts. The series of disputes between them that commenced after their father's demise suggests to me that this is more than a commercial matter.

Granted that there is a commercial interest for each of the brothers in the outcome of the case, to my mind, it is clear that this is a family feud related to inheritance that is being resolved in the courts. Notwithstanding the claim in the story that Mukesh and Anil Amabani are together managers of corporations that account for 5% of the Gross Domestic Product for India, I suspect that the feud between them cannot be resolved through the courts. Indeed, the proper arbiter here may still be their mother as she was the one who engineered the initial division of the property inherited from their father. Evidence that this is not entirely a commercial dispute would come in a subsequent court battle irrespective of the outcome of the present one. As a consequence therefore, the real arbiter for 5% of India's GDP is Kokilaben and she requires the wisdom of Solomon here.

Book Publishers Have Lost This Fight

In the arena of business, very few things are certain but I have been making written bets on this weblog about the arrival of Kindle and the possibility that it will change not only the delivery of books but also the economics of publishing. It is apparent to me that the arrival of the Internet led to successful distributors like Amazon and Barnes and Noble but these alone did not shake the economics of the book industry by a great deal. As it is, the same stores had to deal with the publishers and were merely trying to develop retail outlets with a wide number of titles.

That is why, the books publishing industry has been behind the curve even as the arrival of digital formats has required some degree of revision. They have failed to note that just because they have a trusted model that ensures their profitability off hard covered books does not mean that the market will continue to respect that. I argued here that it is particularly ill-advised that in spite of the clear difference in costs, they have insisted on selling digital copies at the same cost as the paper copies. Whatever the reasons given, they forgot that in the long term, the prices must draw closer towards the marginal costs.

Marion Maneker presents the best analysis I have seen following the recent price war on this year's best sellers between Amazon, Target and Walmart. In my view, a price war may not be ideal for the corporations but it is ideal for students of economics and especially for the book readers who purchase those titles. The article is incisive because it states that the economics of books publishing will change especially in the manner in which the pricing and royalties are paid. In my view, the sliding scale approach is more apt because it reduces the risk of failure for the publisher and rewards the authors in accordance with the real sales of the text. As Marion Manker argues, the publishers are more inured to the existing model and less inclined to reducing their profits per copy of the titles.

In conclusion, the publishing industry is already incrementally losing this battle and it is best to reconsider the model now than have to be supplanted completely by either Walmart, Amazon or Target. The longstanding model that worked for hard cover and which allowed a title that is published at US3 to sell for 8 times the amount will most probably survive for a large number of books. My bet is that it surely cannot be transplanted in whole as a pricing model for e-books.

3D Movie Glasses: Anthropologists to the Rescue

Business advise today is pretty sophisticated and is largely a spreadsheet dominated trade. However, one need not read many articles and analyses documenting the serious missteps that corporations have made while taking steps from business advisory firms and management consultants to wonder how some things get overlooked. This occurred to me as I read this piece describing how the 3D movie theatres and accompanying equipment is totally unsuited for children and younger audiences. This is unbelievable to me because to start with animated movies are particularly suited for 3D viewing hence are particularly dependent on an audience of children.

Steve Chamberlain of the Guardian presents his experience as a frustrated parent who realized that viewing glasses do not fit his children in spite of having spent a premium to provide the children with a fantastic viewing experience. This just leads me to ask whether the corporations developing 3D movies theatres and developing the content ever heard of anthropologists. It is such serious omissions that give business advisers and marketing people a deservedly bad name. I hope they lose sufficient business to recall that children's heads are of different circumferences. It looks like some of these guys have never heard of deviations from the mean.

How do Pacesetters Affect the Outcome of Races?

As a person who watches sports events and tries to put in some analysis about what it takes to win one event or another, I am still unable to understand fully how record breaking performances benefit from pace setters or not. For instance, Sammy Wanjiru is without doubt a phenomenon in the marathon. I first watched him run during last year's Olympics games in Beijing and was impressed with his control of the race and the calculation towards the ends of that race. My thinking then as he casually jogged into the stadium was that this was definitely a unique runner among elite athletes in an extremely difficult and painful event.

Apart from that performance, the same athlete handily won the Chicago Marathon a couple of days ago. Liz Robbins of the NYT reports on the race and mentions the progress in that race. The fascinating thing in my view is the versatility of the athlete here because the running conditions in Beijing last year where the temperatures were very high. Come Chicago a year later and in vastly different conditions, he still won impressively.

The lingering question in my mind though is that the races are also different because unlike the elite marathon events, the Olympics event does not allow for pace setters. I wonder what effect, if any, the pace setters really have on the outcome of a race and whether there may be a better device for pacing an athlete towards breaking the record without involving other runners. In my view, the use of pace setters involves the introduction of assistance during the race. Not that it would matter for Sammy Wanjiru who lowered the record in Beijing by three minutes despite the absence of a designated pace setter. And noting that pace setting is not possible for the sprints, are there conditions in which pace setters are most siutable?