"The Uses, Abuses, and Non-uses of Quantitative Models in the British Railway Mania"

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• Andrew Odlyzko (University of Minnesota)
• Wednesday 21 October 2015, 11:00-12:30
• Meade Room, Faculty of Economics.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Cambridge-INET Institute, Faculty of Economics.

Many sources, including scholarly ones, claim that investors in the Railway Mania had no rational grounds for their profit expectations. In fact, they had available to them a systematic demand estimation methodology that was required by Parliament. This methodology had proved spectacularly accurate during the smaller railway mania of the 1830s, the only instance that has been found of accurate demand prediction for a revolutionary technology. However, this method was based on several false assumptions, and had that been understood, the investment disaster of the Railway Mania could have been predicted beforehand.

This talk is part of the Cambridge-INET Institute, Faculty of Economics series.

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