Please join in a moment of censoring silence so we can fully present with each other this morning. Let's get musically present with each other by turning to the words for gathering him which you find inside your order of service. Hey everybody and welcome to a beautiful Sunday morning here at First Unitarian Society where independent thinkers gather in a safe nurturing environment to explore issues of social spiritual and ethical significance as we try to make a difference in this world. I'm Steve Goldberg a proud and very charming member of this congregation and I'd like to extend a special welcome to any guests, visitors and newcomers. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society I think you'll find that it's a special place and if you'd like to learn more about our special buildings we should have a tour guide today to conduct a tour for you. If you're interested in that just meet over here by the windows after the service and we'll take care of you. If there is no tour guide that's okay because we'd love to spend some time with you during the hospitality hour right outside the doorway in the commons. This would be a great time to silence those pesky electronic devices that you just will not need during the next hour and that goes for those of you watching at home as well. So while you're taking care of that task let me remind you that if you're accompanied by a youngster today and you think that that young companion would rather experience the service from a more private spot we have a couple options for you including our child haven in the back corner of the auditorium and some comfortable seating just outside the doorway in the commons from which you and your youngster can see and hear the service and one of the reasons we are able to see and hear the service today is that it is brought to us by a wonderful team of volunteers who deserve our thanks our gratitude our hugs and our high fives and maybe even put them in your will because we really appreciate their volunteer service. I'm talking about Pete Daly who's running the sound system today. Our greeters upstairs Mary Savage and Pamela McMullen our lay minister Tom Boykoff our ushers Tom Dalmage Brian Channis John McGevna and Dan Bradley our hospitality and coffee provider Nancy Kossoff and John twos has made sure that the foliage up here is vibrant and properly watered no other announcements today except the number 19 that that's how many days until cabaret on Friday evening May 12 this entire place will be turned into one Irish party we're going to spend the night in Ireland and you're going to have a chance to enjoy Irish music food I won't say Irish food but food and a wonderful silent and live auction a chance to connect with people and just have a lot of fun cabaret is one of the real fun events in our annual calendar when my kids were younger they used to call first Unitarian society the cabaret church so if you want to buy tickets in advance and save a little money you can do that during the hospitality hour and before you sit back to enjoy today's service let me just add that cabaret is coming it'll be here real soon we'll spend the night in Ireland and we'll dance to some Irish tunes we'll have a silent auction and a live one wait and see and we'll raise a lot of money for first society whoever you are hear that voice calling you calling us that voice which calls us together here today in this room made holy by our presence and by the sacred breath we share in our singing and speaking and silence that voice which calls us to remember that we are not alone and that we are inextricably linked to all other life woven into a vast tapestry of existence of which we are a powerful integral and holy part and just as we have been called together here today we act as the voice the heart the hands of another call the call to walk with the wanderers to sing and dance with the worshipers proclaim the memory of those who have taken their leave wrap the despairing and the broken in the arms of love and community and hold the hands of all of us and call us back again and again to the covenantal work of justice humility and steadfast faithfulness for this we are here together today so my friends come yet again come and if you will rise and body your spirit to join in the affirmation for our chalice lighting printed in your order of service we light our flaming chalice to illuminate the world we seek in the search for truth may we be just in the search for justice may we be loving and in loving may we find peace and before we join together in song if you'll take a moment and greet those around you like to come closer for our story today to come on up how are you like in the nice weather to get outside to get outside even if your brother's dragging you down come on down you want to be over there huh welcome Len Len's our big kid it's nice to see you guys here today you dyed your hair oh I see pink in there very cool I think I might try that next time I go and say put in a little pink what do you think and she's like no you ever moved to a new school or a new house you have that can be pretty tough right especially moving to a new school you know somebody who moved yeah well our story today is about a girl named Vivian who moved with her mom to a town right on the ocean in South Carolina and this is Vivian's story and there are pictures that are going to be up see them it's called follow the moon home you wish that thing wasn't there if that thing wasn't nine gazillion pounds I would just move it right out of the way for you do you want to come over here I know it's really just in the way right I'm gonna have to do something about that Vivian and her mom were moving boxes into their new house and Vivian was worried about finding her way in this new place before long you will feel right at home said her mom but Vivian wasn't so sure now the next day at her new school her teacher mr. J said welcome Vivian you are just in time for the fun we are looking for a problem to solve Vivian got out her pencil and bit her lip did you ever do that when you're nervous just kind of bite your lip a little bit like that Vivian rode her bike all over town looking for a problem mostly she just got lost on Saturday she took her two dogs Samson and Luna for a run on the beach she laughed as they pulled her along and she said let's make a gigantic hole the dogs dug bigger and bigger holes until it was raining sand a man walked by and said that looks like a lot of fun but be sure you fill in that hole because it's nesting season Vivian smoothed out the sand and said nesting season what is nesting season and a voice behind her said it's because of the babies Vivian turned to see a girl from school now look at that sign can you tell what the babies are yeah whoa loggerhead turtles that's exactly right I'm Clementine the girl said baby sea turtles need a clear path to the sea and if there are holes or there are sand castles that'll get in their way Vivian said I didn't know that we had sea turtles here we do Clementine said and sometimes they need our help now later that night Vivian and her mom went down to the beach Mr. Jay had told them to use their eyes to look for a problem and as darkness fell they could see the bright lights coming on one by one in the shore see him coming on in all those houses there that's it Vivian cried the lights in the houses are the problem why would the lights in the houses be the problem yeah I stand by the fact that we have the smartest children in the world in this congregation she's exactly right did you hear what she said the turtles have to follow the light of the moon to get out to the ocean and if all the bright lights of the houses are behind them what could happen the moon be able to see the moon and then they'll follow the lights of people's houses and end up going the wrong way but Vivian said there's so many houses how can I ask all of these people to turn off the lights and her mother said the trickier part is that most of these houses are vacation rentals so new people come every few days we'd have to knock on the doors every single night Vivian said so clearly Vivian needed help to solve the problem and she knew just where to get it so on Monday morning Clementine and Vivian raised their hands first they told the class what they learned and what they knew about the loggerhead sea turtles the sea turtle eggs are starting to hatch Vivian said and to save the hatchlings we need the whole class the whole town to help and that's how lights out for loggerheads began their classroom became the loggerhead lab they gathered lots of information they read books they visited and an aquarium and a sea turtle hospital they had speakers come and talk to their class they brainstorm solutions and they got to work they made posters and delivered them all over town they wrote fact sheets that they could hang in all the beach houses and to pay for the printing and the flyers they held a bake sale Andy the coffee shop man donated a whole pan of his famous granola and everyone they asked said I'm happy to help the editor promised to put Vivian's article in the newspaper the printer gave them a discount two other students learned how to spread the word on the internet Mr. Jay helped them write a press release and Vivian was on television as the class spokesperson they invited volunteers from South Carolina United turtle enthusiasts known as scoot to a town meeting and when the big night arrived the room was packed the room was buzzing with ideas they talked about how to make the beach a great place for turtles what you needed to do mark nests run nightly patrols and what to do if hatchlings got in trouble and at the end they decided to form their own volunteer group people cheered and Mr. Jay said I am so proud of you all that was the best night ever until on the last night of summer Vivian and her mother and her class and their parents all went on turtle patrol everyone smiled as they watched the lights along the beach go out one by one they had done it suddenly a movement on the sand caught their eye over here Vivian whispered they crept closer careful to stay quiet the crescent moon was shining on the waves the sea was glittering like silver she saw one then two what do you think turtles baby turtle hatchlings no more than two inches long all of them bursting from the nest would they know where to go and they were off scurrying over the sand and right where they needed to be right into the ocean and they stood together smiling and silent with wonder and just like those turtles they turned around and followed the moon home if I love this story well because I kind of got a thing for turtles I love turtles but I also love the fact that this elementary school class got a whole town together to do something that needed to be done and it's just a reminder of the power we have when we all come together thanks for being such great listeners we are going to rise in body or spirit and sing you out to classes with our next him 163 please be seated our first reading this morning from Mark Nepo in the winter I met a man in South Africa after several days together I asked him about Ubuntu he said it is a deep African custom he didn't explain but rather repeated its meaning more slowly and with deeper reverence it means I am because you are you are because I am Ubuntu it is something I have always believed in that in the ignited space of our deepest suffering in the release of our deepest fears in the familiar piece of our deepest joys we are each other I've been finding it in every way on the path in how we live off the breath of plants and how plants live off our exhalations I find it in Martin Buber sense of I thou we're only in keeping what is between us real can God appear in the gift of Jesus where two or more of you come together there I am in the one compassion of Buddha in the numinous love that ancient stones emanate if we are still enough to bow to them Ubuntu I am because you are you are because I am how amazing and true it is we need each other to be complete and a second reading is a poem by Wendell Berry it is hard to have hope it is harder as you grow old for hope must not depend on feeling good and there is the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight you also have withdrawn belief in the present reality of the future which surely will surprise us and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction any more than by wishing but stop dithering the young ask the old for hope what will you tell them tell them at least what you say to yourself because we have not made our lives to fit our places the forests are ruined the fields eroded the streams polluted the mountains overturned hope then to belong to your place by your knowledge of what it is that no other place is and by your for you and by your caring for it as you care for no other place this place that you belong to though it is not yours for it was from the beginning and will be to the end belong to your place by knowledge of the others who are your neighbors in it the old man sick and poor who comes like a heron to fish in the creek and the fish in the creek and the heron who man like fishes for the fish in the creek and the birds who sing in the trees in the silence of the fishermen and the heron and the trees that keep the land they stand upon as we too must keep it or die this knowledge cannot be taken from you by power or by wealth it will stop your ears to the powerful when they ask for your faith and to the wealthy when they ask for your land and your work answer with knowledge of the others who are here and how to be here with them by this knowledge make the sense you need to make buy it stand in the dignity of good sense whatever may follow speak to your fellow humans as your place has taught you to speak as it has spoken to you speak its dialect as your old compatriots spoke it before they had heard a radio speak publicly what cannot be taught or learned in public listen privately silently to the voices that rise up from the page of books and from your own heart be still and listen to the voices that belong to the stream banks and the trees and open fields there are songs and sayings that belong to this place by which it speaks for itself and no other found your hope then on the ground under your feet your hope of heaven let it rest on the ground underfoot be it lighted by the light that falls freely upon it after the darkness of the nights and the darkness of our ignorance and madness let it be lighted also by the light that is within you which is the light of imagination buy it you see the likeness of people in other places to yourself in your place it lights invariably the need for care toward other people other creatures in other places as you would ask them for care toward your place and you moments after a piece of music that you just want to go less it be going peace this is one of those moments thank you and I got to tell you after you sing the closing hymn today with the man who created it according to Facebook last night that was the highlight for the 430 service singing blue boat home with Peter Mayer but you're here and I'm here so we'll forge ahead many years ago when I was an intern in Philadelphia Dan and I were fortunate to be able to live with his parents one of the first things I noticed when we moved into their home was the appearance of maps seemingly everywhere they were large and framed hung on the walls they were on side tables and kitchen counters in books on bedroom shelves in purses and glove compartments I remember asking Dan about his family's fascination with maps and his reply well it's how you understand the world how you know where you're going how you decide where you want to be and figure out how you can get there maps help you make sense of things well these days I feel like I need a new map if maps help you understand the world if they help you make sense of things then I need a new one because when I look around I see a divided nation that seems to be losing its way increasing climate constriction around the globe and here at home unprecedented challenges to this American experiment in democracy and the impact of all of these on the most vulnerable among us we need a new map a new understanding of this complex world a new way new markers to help us determine where we want to be and how we're going to get there for millennia and still today there were people known as wayfinders those guided by stars swells dunes and scents to the islands and the villages that have sustained them in their descendants for generations they would find relatively unmarked routes and discover new markers to guide them and to guide those who would come after what would a map for our times look like what markers could we use to lead us from despair into hope or perhaps even into change I would like to claim the lived experience of wonder as our first marker wonder is where we can begin actually we'll begin with this story from the philosopher and author Kathleen Dean Moore which starts with wonder bread it was a white Buick she writes trailing a string of gulls it parked beside me in a gravel pullout catching the wind the gulls winged furiously over the car squawking the passenger door opened and bedroom slippers on thin long legs lowered themselves to the ground without warning slices of bread flew up like toast from a cartoon toaster and gulls swarmed to the open door on the driver's side a woman opened the door grasped the frame and pulled herself to standing the gulls circled her as she made her way to the back of the car when she opened the trunk the gulls went wild the woman reached into her trunk for a loaf of bread she pulled out as much as she could hold in one hand and she tossed it all into the air gulls caught it on the fly what fell to the ground quickly disappeared how many gulls 100 200 I cycled closer not wanting to scare the birds or intrude but wanting to feel the wind of those flapping wings she saw me coming want some she offered and in fact I really did she beckoned me over to her trunk and I saw that every nook and cranny was crammed with bread one plastic grocery bag after another each bag stuffed with five full loaves of soft wonder bread safeway sells it she said five loaves for a dollar we've been doing this every day for ten years it's what we do I stood next to her and tossed bread into the wind she gave me half another loaf I would have liked to have eaten it myself I was that hungry for what that woman offered not just the bread but her closeness to the birds but I tore the pieces threw them and slowly backed away there stood the woman her face lifted to the birds her arms wide open in the universal gesture of exaltation gulls fluttered around her in the weeks after I thought about that woman and I thought about how one goes about living like that with that extravagant joy and astonishment how it becomes what you do that hard embrace of what is wonderful which is everything when you think about it every single thing in this mysterious miraculous morning drenched world we were nourished that day by wonder bread not the bread itself but the nourishment that came from being surrounded by flocks of living beings of astonishing beauty humans need this connection this delight the way plants need sunlight if there's one fact true of human beings I would suggest it is this that we want to love and be loved delight and be delighted give and be given in the back and forth relatedness that earns us a meaningful place in the pantheon of all being the very muscles that allow us to raise our arms in gladness are the muscles that allow the gull to fly I believe that this universal yearning lifting toward life is the greatest most enduring wonder of all opening ourselves to this sense of wonder this delight in this universal yearning to love and be loved we can be drawn naturally to the next marker on our path the wisdom and knowing and deep need of belonging belonging like wonder is something we need as much as bread and water and sunlight belonging is the sense that we are accepted we are loved we are valued just as we are it is a basic human need right there in Maslow's hierarchy right after food and shelter is belonging when we do not have a place we belong when we do not belong to a group or a people we are lonely and our lives lack fullness we're at risk for alienation intense sadness despair belonging is at the center of our religious life we believe that people fundamentally belong to each other and to the earth and we need one another to create vibrant strong communities today we welcome new members people who have decided to join their stories with ours to find one more place in their lives where they belong to one another and to something larger than any of us in this world of separation and alienation we want to know and be known Mark Nippo told us of Ubuntu I am because you are how true it is we need each other to be complete people walk into this congregation in response to all sorts of longings community guidance support inspiration music education a place to be still a time to breathe to grieve to prepare for the week ahead they long for a way to respond to the hurts of the world or the pains of their life each one of us can think of the longing that brought us here Susan Ritchie writes of her experience with Unitarian Universalism in an essay titled let the wrong ones in somewhere along the line she says someone left the door open for me someone invited me in someone made the way for me even though there is no equivalent of me in our forebears imagination and when things have been bad this tradition has carried me around and given me over and over again the invitation to relationship the invitation to be human as human as I dare the invitation to belong it is my hope that every person who walks through our doors whether you have been here 50 years or today is the first time that all will experience this invitation to be as human as you dare to belong saying that the need to belong goes deeper than one congregation or organization we need belonging with a capital B a sense of belonging taken farther out than we might have thought before belonging to all life in our western tradition we have held a hierarchy of beings with humans being at the tippy tippy top but in native ways of knowing humans are referred to as the younger brothers of creation it can be said that we have the least experience here and therefore the most to learn and we can find wisdom in the teachings of other species big B belonging is feeling at home on this earth feeling at home in this universe feeling a call to connect and to care and what happens if we can think of that marker of belonging with the big B what happens when we think of it as all creatures of the earth and sky this is where we find hope Wendell Berry told us in the reading it is hard to have hope it's harder when you grow old for hope must not depend on feeling good and there's the dream of loneliness at absolute midnight you also have withdrawn belief in the present reality of the future which surely will surprise us and hope is harder when it cannot come by prediction anymore than by wishing but stop dithering the young ask the old to hope what will you tell them is there a reason to hope with all we know of our world today why would we have hope because hope isn't just about reasons it's much more complicated hope may be an emotion that runs counter to reason if we had reason to hope we wouldn't need it we could just go with the evidence hope is something more eco philosopher Joanna Macy tells us that hope is radical imagining a courageous affirmation of what you value a vision that might not be seen by the eye but is alive in your ability to imagine something different Joanna calls it active hope she tells us hope is a kind of process thinking a movie that changes from frame to frame to create change over time if something is not in the picture at the moment that doesn't mean it won't be later on this way of conceiving reality sees existence as an evolving story rather than as predefined because we can never know for sure how the future will turn out it makes more sense to focus on what we would like to have happened and then do our bit to make it more likely that's what active hope is all about so when we look at our new map the markers have led us from wonder to belonging to hope and our last stop which is perhaps where we find the antidote to despair at our times this last stop is integrity here we find the way to move forward acting with integrity like what I have been re-learning in my travel through fourth grade math it hasn't been pretty I didn't know that an integer I didn't remember what that meant but I looked it up an integer a whole number from integrate autumn wholeness a consistency between what one believes and what one does poet Robinson Jeffers said integrity is wholeness the greatest beauty is organic wholeness the wholeness of life and things the divine beauty of the universe love that not humanity apart from that or else you will share humanity's pitiful confusions or drown in despair when the days darken Kathleen Dean Moore who gave us the story of Wonderbred also said that these times are the times that call for integrity we are called to live lives we believe in even if that means changing things people of integrity live gratefully because they believe that life is a gift they act reverently because they believe the world is sacred they live simply because they want there to be enough for all and they act lovingly toward the world because they love it don't ask will my act save the world or another person maybe they will maybe they won't rather ask yourself are my acts consistent with what I most deeply believe is right and good am I living from a place authentically rooted in my knowledge that is surely as we belong to the universe we belong together this is the calling to do what is right even if you can't see the good to celebrate and love the world to work for its healing even if it breaks our hearts to do so and hear those new map markers merge and become transformed into something else entirely wonder belonging hope and integrity when taken together they become stubborn defiant courage they become principled clarity and when courageous clear-minded people find one another it can be a powerful force for change a great rising tide of affirmation of justice and human decency and shared thriving you and I are not the first ones to struggle to ask what one person might do to look for a new in a different way and we're not going to be the last we understand that we're part of a global movement that will never end but will struggle on generation after generation until humanity finds a way to live in harmony and peace with one another and the earth or it fails James Baldwin wrote these words in nothing personal and I'll leave you with them today for nothing is fixed forever and forever and forever it is not fixed the earth is always shifting the light is always changing the sea does not cease to grind down rock generations do not cease to be born and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have the sea rises the light fails lovers cling to each other and children cling to us the moment we cease to hold each other the moment we break faith with each other the sea engulfs us and the light goes out may we be strong enough to reach out and hold on to one another as if our very lives depended on it because in the end we all know they do and if you'll join me now in a spirit of meditation spirit of life and hope rest in us now as we gather side by side in recognition of our common humanity and in our care for one another in our struggles and loss may we find comfort and hope in our times of celebration may we feel inspired and grateful may wisdom be ours as we navigate the transitions and challenges of this life together today we hold in our hearts sparrow senty who is at Capitol Lakes for rehab and we send her our strength and our love we hold Adam drop show brother of Rachel drop show and his family who are unexpectedly but very excitedly expecting their second child Ross Woodward who had surgery on Friday and is recuperating extremely well in the hospital and we send her our prayers for continued healing and strength also Kurt Stegi who has returned home after his surgery and is growing stronger every day and we pray that it continues we hold Fran Bicknell in our hearts and we send our loving thoughts to her in hospice may she know the many hearts that surround her and hold her close and finally our love to Kathleen Hoover and her family as they grieve the sudden loss of Mark Hoover Mark's memorial service will be held here in this room on Saturday morning the 29th at 11 a.m. we pray that Kathleen and her family will find peace and healing in the days to come may we be grateful for this community that holds us close for the miracle of life that we share and for the hope that gives us the power to care to remember and to love and I now invite you into the giving and receiving of the morning's offering which is an outreach offering and you can read more about native energy in your order of service we thank you for your generosity this weekend we're welcoming all those who officially joined first Unitarian since December of last year this worshiping community is a long and distinguished history and we're proud that these 25 people have chosen to join their journey with ours becoming a member of this congregation is on the one hand a fairly straightforward proposition when generally attends a series of orientation sessions signifies their intent to join is familiar with our UU principles and our bond of union which hold us together in community and then enters his or her name in our membership book that's all there is to it sometimes we are asked why would someone want to do this we join this congregation because we believe that the promotion of liberal religious values will make a difference in the world that a strong Unitarian Universalist movement will help make our community and the planet a more peaceful and compassionate place we make this commitment because we do believe in the transformative power of our communities and this faith tradition we join because we want to be part of a community that causes us to examine and re-examine ourselves our families our world on an ethical and moral level and also walk with us on our own spiritual journeys we join because we hunger to be in relationship with people who like us regard religion as an open-ended ongoing quest for deeper meaning and more honest and authentic connection our hope is that the experience of membership here will be an experience of abundance and joy in many ways for you on your continuing journey again welcome to membership in First Unitarian Society and now Lynn Scoby is going to read the names of our new members and please come forward as you hear your name and remember to bring your insert please Jill Rumichek Merlin Kreiko, Len Berry, Dana Connolly and if there are other new members whose names I didn't call and you'd like to be recognized please come forward the great parts about being on the board is that you get to welcome new members so do you accept the responsibilities and freedoms associated with membership in a Unitarian Universalist congregation do you pledge to support this religious community with your words your time and your substance are you willing to join the members of First Unitarian Society in a common quest for religious and spiritual understanding and for the common purpose of being reverent and compassionate lives I need to put my glasses on and do you accept these people into this community as companions in the spiritual journey do you pledge to rejoice with them in times of happiness to grieve with them in times of sorrow and to share with them all the blessings of our free faith unless in unison repeat our bond of union we the members of the First Unitarian Society of Madison desiring our religious organization in the spirit which shall make the integrity of life its first frame and leave the front free associate ourselves together and accept to our membership those of whoever theorical the promotion of truth righteousness reverence and charity and now our new members will be offered the right hand of fellowship a custom dating back to Pirate in Times the right hand of fellowship is a sign of acceptance and equality and if you'll join me in welcoming our new members the rise in body or spirit you made it this far so your reward is that you get to sing Blue Boat Home with Peter Mayer and you do have to say it that way if you tell anybody else that it happened from somewhere going from our homes our childhoods going from our cities and countries going from innocence to experience to enlightenment going into mystery and questions going into the desert going to the other side go forth leave behind the comfort and community of one place head into the anxiety of another carry with you the love and laughter of this place and let it light your way carry with you the wisdom you learned and the good memories may they give you strength for your journey and when you have been away long enough far enough done what you have set out to do been there so long that place to starts to feel like home come back come back to the one universal everywhere and every when and every one inclusive home this beloved community of all creation that you can never really leave blessed be and go in peace


ఇశినికితి మాలాచించాపన౿ సృలిలుక౱ిలాతికీ కిక౱ికికీభ్రందిసి పనితిసికాల్సిసి మలికీయా పనితిమాసాకిందిందికిందిందుేమాయికి � so aakash work-shop is actually SSID for the network. now this one is already connected so just cross check that your wifis connected to aakash work-shop that's all. this is without any password or any such thing, alternately the standard procedure is not this on the right hand side, top right hand side you will see multiple dots మోర్వ చినిలోు ధరారAKIourless చారార్రోవ మర్రారాణకంయలాకి objetivo మూర్ష్వకాసై వారాకంయెలం Office ప� metabolismıntలిaisseటికా మర్హె économique�ి ప౏��게న్ కరిరారి. if it is not connected click on it and connect it then you can go back for going back the symbol is on the left corner here this is the symbol for going back always from any place here that you have it will come back here by the way do not try to access internet it will not access internet because proxy is not set but it is asking for enrolment number okay your enrolment number is last 4 digits of your tablet there is a tablet id on each tablet so for example my tablet says 1 0 0 0 1 7 8 2 so 1 7 8 2 will be my enrolment id your enrolment id will be last 4 digits so insert the enrolment id as your last 4 digits i am sorry they have one slide apparently the way they have set it up that setup requires you to do lot more work than just giving enrolment id you also have to set some ip address one second please hold on this is the procedure that they are showing this is important because on that day on 10th i will be conducting a quiz from here for as many tablets as you have received so it is important that you understand this which is what you will have to use later so carry on so you will get home screen all of you are familiar with this next what they are showing is how to install that apk these slides will be on the moodle you can follow that up after you have installed the apk on these tablets it has already been installed but other tablets you will have to install the apk now once you have installed the apk you are ready to run the quiz the process for setting up your tablet for that is to go to the wifi screen as i said you click on the wifi to see the available networks first turn the wifi on in your case it should already be on you will see multiple names on the right hand side today you should be seeing aakash workshop that is the internet that is the wifi access point that you will have to use once you click on that aakash for example here it says aakash connected in your case it should be aakash workshop connected after that you select the clicker application now how to select the clicker application you go to the original top screen clicker apps and you click on the clicker application there it might be selected from even the large number of applications that you see in the larger screen or from the top screen so all of you have selected the clicker application now there you have to give the enrolment id and you have to enter the server id the enrolment id is the last 4 digits of your tablet id which is available at the backside of the tablet and the server ip today is this <IP_ADDRESS> it will take some practice if you put a hand on to enter server ip that point automatically a typewriter will appear on the right bottom corner there is a numeric keypad press that and you will get the numbers it may take some time to get used to it type it there is a back key in case you make a mistake but set up the server as <IP_ADDRESS> so I have most of you entered the server ip address so you got the enrolment id and server id after that when you enter it and say go you should actually see this page what you are seeing is so it should show a welcome participant screen ok good so now we can start the quiz I understand that some people are still not connected that waiting for quiz message has not come so let me share with you some secret my team has tested this application first with 20 participants then with 40 participants and then with 100 participants but they never had 250 people available to test the quiz so this is the first time you are all providing an experimental setup now those of you who are familiar with Wi-Fi networks and Wi-Fi access points will be aware that the number of IP addresses that the Wi-Fi access point gets is either limited or can choke if it does not choke then the connections may choke so Wi-Fi is a very unpredictable joker and therefore however what we know is that up to 100 IP addresses there was never any problem ok partial good news 244 IP addresses have been given successfully so there are 244 tablets floating around here and 244 IP addresses have been given however the server is not able to connect to each one of those 244 and push the page appropriately so that seems to be a problem we will have to solve this however let me ask another counter question how many of you have got that final page already can you raise your hands waiting for quiz welcome participants whatever so for those of you who are waiting for quiz or you have been welcome you will now get a quiz so this is a simple quiz you will actually see the quiz here we are setting the time to be 2 minutes what happened we are launching the quiz so this is the at the remote center you will see this page no no that's ok if you are waiting for quiz it will it will get pushed see the server that we have is configured as if it is a remote center server I was I was advised by Prasapurshottam Kulkarni who is an expert on Wi-Fi networks that 30 to 40 Wi-Fi connections working full place is ok the moment you go to 60 or 100 you could have problems and if you go to 250 God save you now God is not saving us today anyway we will continue to work on this because we have successfully tested it in a class of 100 with 2 multiple Wi-Fi access points they have tried to put 3 Wi-Fi access points here so answer them because we want to see how many answers are collected it's ok right or wrong does not matter sir I request you to allow 30 participants only to get connected with the wireless after finishing the quiz they will disconnect the Wi-Fi and the rest of the participants they can try that we will continue till midnight at this rate but let me assure you we are all technical people if it works with 2 it can work with 2000 provided the basic technology supports it we understand that the bottleneck is in the Wi-Fi network it is not on the server side it is not on the Akash side that much should be obvious our team will continue to work to resolve these problems our ambition is not this workshop this is only for demonstration our ambition is the classes that will begin in your colleges from the next semester before 1st of January we should resolve these problems so that at least for a class of 60 the teacher is able to conduct the quizzes proper so that much we will ensure ok we will also try and see what is the problem given that there are only 20-30 tablets that are likely to come in each of your centers you should have no problem please understand that this problem comes only when in a single classroom a large number of Wi-Fi connections are required since this will be distributed and you are connected on internet to the main server we expect the quiz conduct to go very smoothly during the workshop when we conduct a quiz but you will have to advise all the participants that this is how the quiz will be conducted ok so we will stop this now


Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Mountain View, California at Nightscope, a really interesting company that's making autonomous vehicles. They're not cars, they're robots, and they're for security, and they're deployed and they're in use, I think it's 15 states or 14 states all over the country, just close to a huge round of funding, a lot of great momentum, and we're really excited to be rejoined by CUBE alumni, Mercedes Soria. She is the VP software engineering. Mercedes, great to see you again. Thank you for having me. Absolutely, well thanks. We had you at the studio last time, so thanks for having us over here at the, where all the action's happening. Yeah, you're welcome to come anytime. Absolutely, all right, so for the people that missed the first interview, just give them a quick overview of what Nightscope's all about. We build autonomous security robots. Those are machines. They're running around autonomously, collecting video, collecting signals like thermal signals, the signal from your phone, they're collecting a bunch of information that then is transformed into a webpage that a customer can see, so they get alerts to anything that is out of the ordinary. Okay, so again, the application's often like in a mall or in a parking lot or some of these types of places where it's really kind of an ongoing patrol that the robot does. Yeah, and typically what you want the robot to do is the monotonous work. So at a mall, the security guard walks around all day long and most of the time, nothing happens. So when something happens, only then you want to be notified. Otherwise, it's just a guard that walks around. So that's the job that the autonomous robots do. And are the, is there somebody monitoring all of the sensors and stuff all the time or is it more of an alert system or is it kind of all over the map? So it depends on our clients. For example, we always monitor all the robots. So we get alert systems set up so if anything happens to a robot, we will be notified. But on top of that, some of our customers like to see their video 24 hours a day to see what's going on at their facilities. Some other clients only want the security presence so they don't look at video. It really just depends on what the client wants. Right. And what's the big difference by having a night scope robot versus just security cameras that are just pointing and on all the time? Yeah, so if you have a steady camera, by default, it just doesn't move. So you can't cover that much space. You're only going to see that one box that the security camera is covering. With an autonomous machine, you can take it whatever the crime is happening. You see something that's wrong. You move the machine over and you take a closer look. So it does a lot more than just this one square that you can look at all the time. You can see everything around the machine. It's 360 degree video that is running 24-7. And how does it impact the way that the security people do their job? Let's just stick with the mall example. When you introduce a night scope robot, what's the right word? Is the robot the right word? It's a robot, yes. When you introduce a night scope robot into a mall situation, how does that change the way that people do their job? Yeah, so their robot will do about 70% or so of what a security guard does. But now that guard, instead of having to go and walk around the mall all day long, they get to do a more interesting job. So now they're monitoring robots. They know technology. They get to know how to deal with the machine, how to interact with people. Those are things of a higher level. If the machine does all of the monotonous and boring work that the guard does. So at the end of the day, that guard does something that is a lot higher level than what they were doing before. And do customers typically have fewer guards? Do the guards just doing more higher value? How does it impact their whole security system once they bring in a night scope robot? So it could be one of two things. There are some places that our customers have zero, zero, zero patrolling. So they have nothing. So in that case, if the robot comes in, now you have security that you didn't have before. Some of other clients, they decide that one of the robot is going to do the job for maybe three people. But those three people now are doing administrator work. So their work is to become of a higher level. So it depends on the client a lot. OK, so we've got a bunch of the robots behind us here in the shot. I'm sure we'll have them in the intro package of the different ones. So you've got four different ones. First off, let's do some of the basics. What are some of the sensors? What are some of the inputs that they are collecting? And why do you have four different ones? Yeah, so a lot of what we have four of ones is because we wanted to give the customer security regardless of their environment. So from the first one is the K3. That's an indoor machine. It's a smaller size. It weighs about 340 pounds. A small one, and you say it weighs 340 pounds. Yes, that's the small one. Yeah, that's the small one. The little kids are running up and tipping that one over, I don't think. No, they're not. People have tried, but not yet. So that is for indoors. And it has all of the sensors that all the machines have. They all have a thermal detection. They have their regular cameras. They have inertial measuring units. They have lighters, which is what allows you to tell that there's something in your way that you have to get out of the way. We have ASD, which is automated signal detection. So your phone emits a signal when it's trying to connect to a Wi-Fi. So we can detect all of those phone signals, and then we can log that into the server. So all of the machines have that. It's just how do you use it in a different environment? Right, right. Yeah, so indoor for the K3, outdoor for the K5. We have the K1, which is a static unit. That's typically going to be put in the door of the places we're going to monitor. And then we have the K7, which is the largest unit that we have so far. And it's going to places that are a machine that's smaller cannot typically transverse. And that's the one that looks like a little jeep back here. Yeah, in a wind farm, in a solar farm, these machines don't do very well, and that's when these machines are there. So definitely for outside, on the door. Large companies. They don't have to be in a parking lot in a paved environment. They grow up all in a different type of environment. And then what is the experience? Why do these things work? Is it just because you have more coverage, because you've got a robot that's going places that you don't have enough guards? The intimidation that someone is watching me now, you're bringing a camera into the parking lot, or maybe it was kind of hidden behind a wall. Is there a two-way interaction? Do people talk to these things and expect them to talk back? Where do you see kind of the most effective, why are these things effective? The reason why they're most effective can be summarized in one point. Security guards don't like to do their job. There is a 300% turnover rate in the security industry. People don't normally know that. So you're getting a new team every four months. So people don't like their job. It's a job that is very monotonous, very boring. And we're putting a robot there to do the same job so you can free people to do something of a higher level. And that's the main reason why they work. All right. I wonder if you can speak a little to where you're using machine learning and some of the deeper technology beyond just simply putting a camera on a mobile platform. So some of our customers, for example, at night, at the malls or our corporate campuses, there isn't supposed to be anyone there at night. So one of the big applications that we have is, we have an image and from that image, we have trained our algorithms to detect people in that image, to detect faces in that image. All of that is doing by machine learning because we have about five years of data of images and people and we train our algorithms to say this is a pole or this is a person, this is a tree, this is a person. So we get to detect people in a really high accuracy level, about 80%. We also do the same thing with license plates.  And all of that uses machine learning for even to this friendship that there is a number one opposed to a letter L. So all of that had to be trained as the technologies that we're using. And then for the future, we're gonna use prediction algorithms in a way that now we have data of what happens around the location where the machine is deployed to. So we're gonna be able to say, okay, this area has a lot of crime that happens on a daily basis or however often, you probably should go patrol over on that area. That is what you will do in the future. And then the other interesting thing is you don't sell these, these are not for sale as like going to buy a car, you actually provide it as a service. So a very different business model, very much in line with what we see more and more, right? So it's a service. So people basically rent the robot with the monitoring service, is that accurate? Or are there lots of different kind of flavors that they can buy? Yeah, so what we do is called machine as a service. So to eliminate our customers having to pay a big amount of money at the beginning, they don't cover that cost we do, but they pay us a monthly, a monthly bill. And that included in that monthly bill is the machine itself, all the parts, the monitoring that we do on our end, and all of the software upgrades, which we do every two weeks, and all of the hardware upgrades, which we do every six months to every year. All of that is included in that package. Now, how the customer chooses to monitor their machines, that is up to them. We have agreements with two of the largest security guard companies, Securitas and Ala Universal, so they can do the monitoring for the customer if they don't have a security operation center. Okay, and clearly you're operating in places where they already have security in place, they have systems. So do you integrate with the existing alert systems and the existing infrastructure that they already have in place, and you guys just tie into that? I would imagine there's some industry APIs that you can feed into those systems, or is it a completely independent monitoring that they have to do now? So we did a little bit of reverse of that. So we build our system, but for it to be integrable. So the way we wrote our code, a customer and system developer can call our APIs and get the information from the machine that way. So all of that is finished, so they can integrate with us, opposed to us integrating on the other, there's hundreds of systems out there. So if somebody wants to look at data from Nightscope, that's already there. Okay, but you've got the open API into your data feed, so they can feed whatever system. And of course it's secure, right? You have to have keys and passwords and codes and all of the information is encrypted. So there's measurements that we've taken to make sure that the information is secured at all times.  We're doing design too. And design, and autonomous vehicles. Yes. What did I miss? Production, we build, we build, yes. That's right, I noticed it says on the bottom, it reminds me of like Apple product, right? It is built, designed and built in California. 85% of what you see in this machine is United States. Pretty amazing. So what's next? What's kind of the next big challenge? I know the seven is not released yet. Is it just more form factors? Is it different sensors? What is, as you kind of look forward from an engineering challenge, what are some of the next big hills that you guys want to take to move this thing along? So there are three next big hills that we have. Number one is getting the K7 out there and patrolling. Number two is concealed weapon detection that has been requested by a lot of our customers. Concealed weapons detection. A lot of our customers are requesting that. And third, on the software side of things, the actual prediction of crime that could potentially happen. Those are the next three big goals for night scope. So I would imagine with the concealed weapons, it's just more types of sensors that can see X-rays or whatever to get more visibility to big V, not necessarily visible light, but visibility for the machine. Yeah, so some of those things have already been requested by our customers because what we built is actually a platform. We can add other sensors to the machine, depending on the needs of a customer. For example, we have a customer who wanted the machine to be able to identify people. So they wanted to swap a card, put the sensor inside, it's extensible, it's already there and you get your sensor and your information. What's the biggest surprise that you hear from customers after they've had one of these deployed for, I don't know what's a reasonable time, six months. So they're kind of used to it and it's in their workflow. How does it really change your world? What do they tell you? So the two things, number one is how quickly people like the machine, how quickly they go, oh yeah, it's here and it's working. And then also how much crime has actually been eliminated. So they thought, okay, maybe I have a warm break in the car every week, well maybe it will just go to less. It goes down to zero.  So that was a surprise for them and that was a surprise for us as well. That's how effective the machine actually is. Yeah, it's weird when I just drove up today, there was one right in the middle of the driveway as I was coming in and I was like, well, is it gonna move? Am I gonna move? I mean, it's just very, much more intimidating than you might think. It's a presence for sure. Yeah, and we have things like car backup detection, right? Because the machine could be going down and straight and a car could be coming out of there. So we have to detect stuff like that so we don't get run over. So all of those little things that we didn't think of, all of that have, we have to do that a lot. All right, Mercedes, well thanks for inviting us over. It's fun to actually see the machines for real. Thank you, thank you so much for coming. Thank you. She's Mercedes, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We're at Nightscope in Mountain View, California.


In the title we have this term optional intermediaries and what we mean by that is simply a platform that users can choose to use or not to and particular to make purchases. So the examples would be that if you're going to say you know you're interested in buying a water filter you can buy it via amazon or you can go directly to the seller's website and buy it from the seller or you want to order a meal from a particular restaurant you can order it using an app like DoorDash or you can call the restaurant or order directly from the restaurant's website. Similarly hotel rooms you know lots of examples like this and the pricing restraints that we're interested in are the so-called price parity clauses or as it's called in some of the literature price coherence. So we're thinking about this distinction between the case where the platform imposes a price coherence restraint versus the case where the platform allows the sellers to have price flexibility and we're asking some pretty basic questions like what effect did these restraints have on consumer surplus and on total surplus and when do platforms have an incentive to impose price coherence. So for some context these this this issue the issue of the effects of price parity clauses and so forth has a long-standing place in economic discussion and in policy discussions. There's it's related to issues of credit card payment card regulation another big issue that I'm sure people are familiar with has to do with most favored nation clauses and there there's often a story about competition and the effects that these might have on competition that's not going to be part of what what we look at. Another one that's gotten another area that's got gotten a lot of attention recently has to do with the rules that app stores set for software developers. So you know I'm not going to go into this too much because the goal in this paper is to remain quite abstract and to try to uncover a set of crucial driving forces in a pretty basic model of this situation and these are forces that at least to the best of our knowledge are interesting and understandable but also have not really received clear treatment or as much attention as we think would be useful. Now to preview a little bit the model is very directly inspired by the model that appears in a paper by Julian Edelman by Ben Edelman sorry Ben Edelman and Julian Wright in the QGE 2015 which in a sense our motivation for getting involved with this with this topic was because we found that paper I mean I saw Julian present that paper so Ben present that paper at Julian's conference a long time ago in Singapore and always found it to be really interesting and so it's particularly nice to have Julian as the discussant for for this and one of the main findings I think this is a fair characterization a main finding of that paper is that price coherence tends to be harmful because it leads to excessive intermediation it leads to as the authors would would probably put it too many transactions going through the platform compared to what would be efficient and in a sense as somebody who's flown all around the world buying economy class tickets and often upgrading to business class I found this story to be personally offensive and wanted to sort of test the limits of the theory saying that this you know that there's this excessive intermediation but of course I'm all joking aside the issues there were really very interesting but also seemed like they called for just a bit of you know we felt motivated to understand them further and so in this paper our contribution is to really change the model of the the good market compared to what's in that paper in that paper there's a good market which uses a salam circle demand configuration and here we're going to in a sense make things more basic by just looking at a monopoly seller rather than competition among sellers but we're also going to relax assumptions on demand curvature and the sort of punchline will be that under low convexity demand price coherence can be surprisingly good for consumers and for total welfare it's even possible that the platform lacks sufficient incentive to require price coherence and these results stem from what strikes as an interesting effect that we call the drawing in effect whereby price coherence spurs purchases spurs more purchases by consumers who have low valuations for the good which is kind of an interesting theme because if you listen to some of the discussion about if you listen to some of the discussion about say American Express or other platforms that impose this kind of restraint there's a sense that their imposition of the constraint benefits relatively wealthy people or high valuation consumers at the expense of low valuation consumers and while we're not trying to push this too far there is something kind of interesting to think about here about what's driving this and that it's really the low valuation consumers who are being drawn into the market when you have price coherence imposed by the platform all right so I will go to the model now we have a platform a unit mass of buyers and a single merchant and the basic setup is one where in the absence of a platform it would just be sort of the simplest most plain vanilla monopoly model that you can imagine buyers each you know buyers have unit demand for a good sold by the merchant they have valuation v from for the good that comes from some you know drawn from an interval between zero and v bar and there's a distribution evaluations g so in the absence of the platform the merchant would be a monopolist with demand given by this function q and it would we're assuming that it has zero marginal cost but now we add the platform to the mix buyers have the same valuations for the good but there are two groups of buyers a share lambda of them are just non-users who are going to behave exactly as the users would in the monopoly model they just purchase if the valuation for the good is greater than the price and PD here is denotes a little bit more formal with the notation in a second of prices here PD is the the price to buy the price that you have to pay to buy directly then there's the one minus lambda share of users and they have the choice to either purchase directly so they get V minus PD because they've paid directly they've bought directly and paid the direct price or they can purchase via the platform in which case they get a bonus B which you can think about as being a number of different things it could be for example free delivery that you get from the platform whereas you might have otherwise had to go pick it up it can pick the good up it can be a an improved ability to return the good or a warranty service so you can think about the B being a lot of different things this B is homogeneous across users whereas the Vs are everybody has an individual B an individual V but the B is homogeneous in this model and then if you buy through the platform you potentially pay a different price and PM denotes the mediated price so one important concept is just this one of net price where you have PM minus B as sort of the relevant thing if somebody is going to if a user is going to purchase through the platform the relevant comparison is between V and the net price and we compare two regimes the one price flexibility where the merchant can set price directly sorry set the direct price PD and also the mediated price PM we compare this with price coherence which is a regime where the platform has imposed that the merchant is allowed to just set one price for both direct sales and mediated sales and that's we call P hat and from the setup we can write the merchant's profits under the two regimes and this is very straightforward you know the merchant is receiving a lambda share of profits from the non-users in both regimes and then a one minus lambda share from the users in both regimes of course the prices are going to be important here in the price coherence is in some sense simpler because every user is going to be paying P hat but it's important to just you know do the right mechanics here the price that matters in terms of determining the marginal consumer for the case of mediated sale or for users is the net price because they're going to be getting they're going to be comparing you know users will be comparing their V evaluation for the good with the net price whereas for non-users the only thing they care about is just P and then also as far as the marginal cost we've assumed that there's zero marginal cost for the seller of of producing the good but there's this fee there's this transaction fee F that's set by the platform and so that's an endogenous quantity and so for all purchases made by users via the if users choose to make the purchase via the platform then the merchant incurs the marginal cost F whereas if non-users buy or if potentially if a user were to not make the purchase via the platform but instead purchase directly then the F wouldn't be wouldn't be part of the store wouldn't be a marginal cost so in the basic model the timing is as follows and then I'll relax this a bit even more that I'm going to proceed in three steps which you'll see the but to fix ideas let's think about this timing first the platform does two things it sets the fee F the per transaction fee and it also chooses whether to allow the merchant to have price flexibility or to impose the price coherence restraint um and I just just to clarify in the main setup in the main setup F is a per transaction fee but in the paper we also allow it to be an ad valorem fee so in practice you tend to see these things as proportion fees that are proportional to the revenue of the transaction rather than a per transaction fee and the results that I'm so so this setup that I'm talking about and that we have in the main text of the paper is a per transaction fee but that turns out not to be a crucial factor for the for the results and it's it's just more sort of more cumbers a lot of the calculations are more cumbersome when you do the proportional fee but we derive we derive everything in the appendix involving that when we use a using a proportional fee um okay so that's what the platform does then after what once the platform is moved the merchant chooses whether to participate on the platform um if it participates then under flexibility it sets the two prices and if it participates under coherence then it sets the one price as we've discussed then all of the buyers are going to choose whether to purchase the good um in solving this problem the users the the ones the buyers who are platform users can choose whether to make their purchases via the platform or to make them directly um all right so in in um this version of the story the um buyers status as either a user or a non-user is exogenously given and and it's captured by this lambda um and then at the end and and as in the Edelman and Wright paper um that's an endogenous choice and I'll talk about that um um but for for simplicity this setup you know just note that this setup is not making the choice of whether to become a user or not endogenous um the um one sorry Alex can I please um the platform users so here you assume that they are aware of the merchant right so the platform doesn't create uh the doesn't create exactly for for the for the brand exactly yes no so the issue of sort of search or providing more opportunities is not something that we're building into this story absolutely correct thank you um and so the the sort of one main assumption in the environment is that demand is strictly globally long log concave and so we're varying um you know so demand curvature is going to be an important thing here but it's not like a lot of papers on demand curvature where we say something like everything you thought was true under log concave demand turns out to be flipped around 180 degrees when demand is log convex that's not I mean that that's sort of the story of every other paper that I write but um in this story we're just restricting attention to um log concave demand and then the interest in a sense the interesting thing seems to be when demand is is a bit more you know a bit less convex than than the upper bound of this um whoops what did I do um all right so in the in the first bit of analysis and to sort of illustrate the main effect I'm going to be just talking about exogenous transaction fees so I'm going to be doing a comparison of the um coherence versus flexi flexibility regimes but for for now let's not even think about the optimal choice of f let's just say that there's some f um and that that's going to be held fixed across the two regimes and then we're going to relax that and think about the effect of varying the f optimum that you know of allowing the platform to vary f optimally in accordance with its choice of regime um so there's just a strictly positive transaction fee and you know some of the details that are in the paper will show that you know in order for this to make sense this f has to lie somewhere in this interval where it's greater than zero but below um and a level f upper bar which is strictly less than b and as long as uh f lies in this interval um described here the merchant would have an incentive to participate regardless of which regime the platform sets so that's so what so in this first exercise we're just going to assume that f is in this interval and then we solve the problem of participation for the merchant um and so first lemma says that given any such transaction fee that leads the merchant to participate under flexibility or coherence the following ranking holds um and so this you know first you can look at just these sort of these nominal prices this is this is very straightforward it says that if you think about the direct price and the mediated price um the mediated price is greater under flexibility the mediated price is going to be greater than the direct price why is that well there's a boost in demand that the users get from um getting that but that benefit be from using the platform that the non-users don't get from just purchasing directly so the mediated price is higher than the direct price and if price coherence gets imposed then the uniform price is going to be you know some kind of a weighted average of these two things it's because it's going to be the price that applies to both both groups and it's going to be in the middle um so that's nominal prices but then we can think about net prices so this is sort of the prices that determine the the cutoff or determine who the marginal users are and the net so that the only net price that matters is obviously for users not for the non-users the net price for users under right so this this inequality is is this first one is implied by this other one that the net price under coherence has to be lower than the net price under flexibility but also the net price under flexibility is lower than the direct price and two takeaways that we use from this lemma are first that coherence has a drawing in effect and by that what do we mean well when we think about the marginal users the ones who have the lowest valuation in all of this are the marginal users under coherence um marginal users under coherence have lower valuations for the good um than do marginal users under um flexibility and these are all buyers with lower valuations than the marginal non-user and then secondly the spread between marginal users and non-users valuations for the good is greater under coherence than under flexibility um so these properties are useful in allowing us to get to the first result so I'm going to talk about consumer surplus under the two regimes in this setting and to do so I want to introduce this so-called undershooting condition so this is just with this is just a condition that you can um that you can ask whether it is satisfied or not with any set of three exogenous prices and so we say that um you know so so this is the um p hat is the price is a price that might arise under price coherence PD is a direct price and PM is a um mediated price and so undershooting holds when under coherence the merchant's nominal price weekly undershoots the population weighted average of the direct and mediated prices it charges under flexibility so right so you look at the um you you look at flexibility the prices that prevail under flexibility um and then you take a population weighted average of those to compare it to the um price that arises under price coherence if that ladder price is lower than the population weighted average then we say that undershooting the undershooting condition is satisfied um and so the first proposition just involves exogenous pricing this is just for any set of prices um and net prices ranked as in the lemma if this undershooting condition is satisfied then consumer surplus is greater under coherence than it is under flexibility and that's um to talk about this let's let's look at this graph and in a way this graph has a lot of the intuition that is I think nice from from the paper and that that drives um drives the results that I that I think are new so I'll talk for a bit about this um you can start off by thinking about a benchmark where you have uh and this benchmark comes from the paper in the rand paper of Chen and Schwartz where they look at differential pricing versus uniform pricing in a context where a seller has two different markets with two different marginal costs so you can think about a seller that simply faces a single demand curve the same demand curve in both of two markets but um it uh has low marginal cost in one market and high marginal cost in another and then in that setting you compare consumer surplus under differential pricing versus uniform pricing and the the basic effect you would get there is that when you impose a uniform pricing constraint you get a reduction in the high price and an increase in the low price and this tends to harm consumer surplus because the increase of the low price um is excluding is cutting off consumer surplus that's that's given by this area a and the decrease in the high price is just creating this new consumer surplus that's represented by the area b and you know the reason for this comes from the ranking of the marginal consumers that when you're adding people who are relatively high valuation this this stems from the convexity of the consumer surplus function in effect when you're adding consumers with high valuations and taking away consumers with low valuations this will tend to decrease consumer surplus however in our setting we're we need to take into account the net prices and the net prices for the users here are the p minus b these are the platform users who are getting some benefit from using platforms so the crucial thing is that um the you know the sort of idiosyncratic feature that causes users to decide whether to buy or not is their v but in terms of users ranking compared to non-users the b is going to essentially shift them from being these high value that the marginal users are instead of being relatively high valuation users they're going to be relatively low valuation users compared to the non-users and so when you go from flexibility to coherence um instead of bringing in new people whose valuations add up to consumer surplus of area b you get you know this this taller area b plus c and so you know the the point is that the gain from this the gain in consumer surplus from this imposition is is is a positive one that the overall net effect on consumer surplus is a positive one because of the the propensity to attract the low valuations consumers rather than the high valuation consumers so i hope i've made that you know as clear as i can in a short period of time so now i'll go to the more endogenous result and to do this we will focus on the particular form of demand constant pass-through demand so this gamma is a parameter that when it's uh um raider makes demand um less and less concave um and when gamma is equal to one we just have uh linear demand um so proposition two with endogenous pricing under constant pass-through demand the merchant chooses prices that satisfy the undershooting condition if and only if gamma is less than or equal to one therefore if gamma is less than or equal to one consumers coherence gives rise to greater consumer surplus than flexibility so this in particular says that for the case of linear demand consumer surplus is greater under coherence than flexibility and also note that the linear demand tightly satisfies the undershooting condition but this undershooting condition is stronger than necessary to guarantee that consumer surplus is higher under coherence so for analytical purposes the undershooting condition is useful but it's not necessary for the result that coherence gives rise to higher consumer surplus than flexibility um and here's a graph that talks a bit more about this this shows a bit more of what I was just saying about the relationship between the undershooting condition and then the just the consumer surplus comparison so here the key thing is on the x-axis that's the gamma parameter measuring convexity one gamma equals one is the case of linear demand so that's the board that's the border between the under to the left of for values of gamma less than one undershooting is satisfied for gamma is greater than one undershooting is not satisfied but for the entire blue area so roughly speaking for values of gamma that are two or lower in this example consumer surplus is greater under coherence um now um the next step that I'm going to be wrapping up soon so I'll just sort of walk you through the the um the the sort of next steps to make this a bit you know my my emphasis has has been to try to um focus on the new effects and how I'm going to kind of make things more endogenous the next step is to just endogenize the the fees f so that there's a regime specific f rather than just holding the f fixed across the two the two regimes and the the bottom line here is that endogenizing the f to make it regime specific is going to help the case for coherence um so to talk about this we first think about a condition that we call primacy of the good um and this just says that the valuation for the good this just basically says that the platform benefit is not too big the valuation for the good of the marginal buyer in the absence of a platform um inflated by the local pass-through rate so that's something that has to be less than less than one under log concave demand um exceeds the benefit that the platform brings exceeds uh versus buying directly that that's bigger than b so you know is the this condition basically says we're not in an environment where the bs are so important relative to the um marginal consumer's valuation for the good itself um and then proposition three says that if this if condition two holds then the platform's transaction fee under coherence is less than the transaction fee under flexibility um and um so i then can give a similar type of result for linear demand um the following statements are true the transaction fee that the platform sets under coherence is strictly lower than the one it sets under flexibility consumer surplus is greater under coherence than under flexibility and in the unique sub game perfect equilibrium of the game the platform chooses to impose coherence and um moreover total surplus is greater under coherence um extending that from linear demand to the case of constant pass-through demand um we get a graph that looks similar to the one i just showed but here this graph is okay so the first thing to note um the borderline between condition one being satisfied or not is no longer a um it it moves up right the undershooting condition is easier to satisfy now because of the fact that the transaction fee is lower under coherence than it is under flexibility and so that makes it more likely that undershooting will be satisfied um and the the one thing sort of the in a sense um the the one thing that can go wrong here is that the when demand is too concave the platform will have an incentive to um choose flex not to impose coherence to choose flexibility even though the um even though imposing coherence would be better for um total surplus and consumer surplus um so now finally the the the last thing to do is to endogenize user participation um and so the setup here just follows the Edelman and Wright setup where each buyer can in can choose whether to become a user or not but signing up to for the platform causes the user to incur adjoining cost c so here we just get this timing where okay the platform is still moving first setting the fee f and choosing the flexibility choosing the regime but now in the second stage there's the simultaneous moves where um buyers are observing their value of c and deciding whether or not to join the platform and at the same time the merchant is deciding whether to join the platform and setting prices um and Alex what do I I should probably wrap up in in like two minutes or what would you say a bit more you've got four minutes thank you okay so you know I don't I don't want to get into too much detail given the the time constraint we have a way of you know we have a way of parameterizing the distribution of joining costs so that we have we sort of mix a uniform distribution of joining costs between those with zero cost and those with some cost c upper bar that's prohibitively high so that they would never join the platform and um the point is we have a mass you know the important thing is we have a mass of people with joining costs that are zero and then another mass of people with joining costs that are laid out over this interval so some consumers are potentially marginal or potentially you know it would be unclear whether they would join the platform or not whereas other users with zero joining costs are definitely joining the platform um and so I'm just going to give an example here under linear demand with specific parameter values um but this you know the the specific parameter values it's not like we chose these it's not like choosing them in a very special way is important for what I'm going to say um the main thing is just not to keep not to let the be the benefit get too high relative to sort of the the valuations for the good when that's true for all of these parameterizations of um joining costs the platform and at equilibrium the platform chooses to impose price coherence and it sets f equal to this upper bound um f bar more joy more buyers join under coherence than under flexibility so this is a key sort of um similarity to the result the theme of the Edelman and Wright paper the marginal the the the cost the joining cost of the marginal buyer under coherence is greater than the joining cost of the marginal buyer under flexibility um and total surplus and and the consumer surplus derived from purchasing the good are greater under coherence and under flexibility um but regarding um the total consumer surplus including consumer surplus from transaction costs and from joining costs that's what is a bit more ambiguous it requires that there be enough um zero joining cost users relative to these interior users in order to make it so that um net consumer surplus is higher under coherence so to wrap up I just will mention a couple of policy considerations this last point raises a new trade-off that I don't think is known or present in the certainly not from the Edelman Wright paper about the um comparison between transaction surplus as a benefit from coherence versus um excessive joining so coherence may at the same time um lead to greater transaction surplus while it also um can lead to accept to this higher joining costs at equilibrium so um these two things should be weighed against one another I mean that our model is saying that it's important to weigh these things against one another in this context and I think a um regarding policy interventions a particular thing to think about is the timing of policy interventions if you think about some policy that might potentially ban price coherence or you know put restraints on the ability of a platform to to to do this kind of price coherence um you have to be careful about doing it in a setting where the where the users have primarily already joined because in a sense if you're in a mature industry where users have already joined and then you come in and um impose this kind of uh a policy that gets rid of price coherence there's the pretend you know our model says that suggests that there's the potential that you would be sort of trying to close the the barn door after the horse has already gotten out in the sense that the joining costs may already have been incurred and the you could further um damage things by reducing the consumer surplus so um you know without being said this is obviously an abstract model and we're doing this in the context you know in a very specific context but I hope that this has been um you know that this has been useful for um shedding light on these these underlying effects so to conclude in this paper we model optional intermediaries and address the incentives and the effects of price coherence restraints we find that demand curvature plays a crucial role and in low convexity environments price coherence tends to boost consumer surplus and total surplus um when demand is sufficiently concave the platform may inefficiently prefer not to impose coherence and the reason why coherence helps is due to the drawing in effect the coherence restraint stimulates purchases by platform users with relatively low valuations for the good so with that I'll finish um and thank you very much thank you Alex for this very clear presentation and now we have a discussant um Julian Wright well thanks uh yeah it was a nice presentation and um I really enjoyed reading this paper um you know the the idea that price coherence could be actually really good for consumers is one that naturally is an interesting possibility to explore and of course other papers in the literature have found trade-offs between um you know the sort of multiple effects and it could go either way but none as clear and simple as the mechanism that you've put forward which is you know it makes it um you know nice to discuss um so what I thought I would talk about is sort of first of all the connection to our paper and I think more broadly than our QGE paper the earlier literature on credit cards and uh no surcharge rules which is you know basically equivalent to price coherence or price parity clauses uh and you know Alex you identified one key difference which is in those models we're looking at competing merchants with unit demand I think that's not just in our paper but in some of the earlier papers like rachanter rolls and so on um where they had hoteling model whereas in your paper you have monopoly seller facing elastic demand right downward sloping demand and so you have this new drawing in effect which um seems quite plausible uh which we didn't have and of course you know if you think about these markets where platforms are you know imposing price coherence I guess there is a question which is a more natural way of modeling it is it a monopoly seller facing elastic demand that has the ability to price to different buyers based on demand um or is it more that prices are determined by competition and just passing through the fees that they face so I mean that's obviously an empirical question but um in some sense what I thought you're capturing with the monopoly seller which can price discriminate um is that price discrimination by monopoly seller is bad for consumers under you know certain demand conditions and I think those demand conditions are satisfied in your in your setting so to some extent you're sort of capturing that idea that you know price discrimination is bad and we want to have we don't want to have monopolist price discriminating we want to have them setting uniform prices that helps consumers um now um aside from that difference which is you know obviously competing sellers versus monopoly seller I think there's another difference between um this earlier literature and what you're doing which you didn't sort of draw out so much which is in our paper we allow the benefit B to be in sort of endogenously determined by the platform's investment in the earlier payments literature they allowed there to be a rebate or a fee charged to the buyer side which the platform determined and so typically you know they might set a high seller fee and they might set a rebate to consumers and so natural question is what happens in your framework if you allow for that kind of endogeneity of two sided pricing basically right because I'm just trying to connect what you do in that earlier literature and that seems to me the only other key difference the other point I wanted to make so this is sort of going now a bit beyond that earlier literature in our 2015 paper is like in that paper and as in your paper the platform never charges more than be the transaction benefit that it provides right and that of course makes it harder for price coherence to be bad and you know that was a constraint we had to work under in our earlier paper and that's why I had this sort of cost mechanism with excessive intermediation but of course if you think more broadly about these platforms that provide a discoverability for the sellers right so they're providing you know cheaper search for buyers to find sellers then there's other reasons why the platform may be able to charge beyond this transaction benefit because if you know if the seller doesn't join they're not discovered and they're willing to pay more than the transaction benefit to be discovered and that's sort of the work that I did with Cheng Zi Wang in the ran paper and other work where you actually see a much stronger sort of negative effect of price parity on consumers because the platform can actually go well well beyond the transaction benefits and prevent the natural showrooming that would happen in that case by imposing price parity so I think that you know that's the sort of one related point to that sort of my last point and coming back to your model bit you know if you think about it in terms of there being two demands right demands of the non-users and demands of the users the demands of the users have higher willingness to pay because they get B from going through the platform so my question would be what happens if you have the reverse situation which is actually the demand function for the non-users has higher willingness to pay would the sort of conclusions reverse and the reason I asked that is because if you think about the direct consumers they may not be as price sensitive as the consumers that are coming to the platform like if you think about hotel bookings right the direct consumers may be not the ones that are searching as much they may not be as price sensitive they may actually have a different demand function than the ones coming through the platform and so you know had some idea that the willingness to pay of the direct consumers may be higher and more generally that captures the idea that the direct consumers may be more captive to the sellers and therefore they have a chance to charge them higher prices so you know that that seems like it might have some interesting effects in your setting and I better stop here in the interest of time very nice paper thank you thanks Julian Alex do you want to take a couple minutes to answer Julian's points and in the meantime to the participants feel free to answer questions in the chat well thank you Julian I think that those are all very good questions and some of them we've thought about some of them we've you know some of them we've thought more about some of them we haven't thought as much about and you know I don't feel as though it's important to go one by one between them because I do think that they're all very good questions and you know I certainly don't intend the thrust of this presentation or this paper to be um proselytizing that price coherence is good under all circumstances or that you know we don't need to worry about it because I think there are a lot of reasons why we do need to be worried about it and you know the intent here is very much to just clarify our thinking and understand this force and how it fits in rather than say anything sort of more ambitious you know overly ambitious more ambitious than that the showrooming is another factor that is very important in this context and you know Julian and others have have have done very interesting work on that also I think that the one of the things that we worked on earlier in this research didn't actually involve investment in the the bees so in the it's indeed true that in the Edelman and Wright paper there's this endogenous investment by the platform in creating the bee and there there's something interesting there that's not in this paper but that you know maybe we'll we'll get around to writing up at some point it sort of ended up being something that was a bit peripheral to the main point of this paper where you can also have if you have heterogeneity in the bees and you have the investment there's a potential for a kind of spence distortion there where the platform focuses on the bee of the marginal a certain type of marginal user whereas the social planner would care about the bee of the infromarginal users which is as far as I know I don't think that's in the QGE paper I could be wrong about that but that's another you know the this is just to say that there are a lot of interesting issues here that I you know I hope that we get a chance to address either in this paper future versions of this paper or in in subsequent work and that you know the goal here is just to be clearheaded and identify this note this you know this particular aspect of the relevant mechanics so I think I'll leave it at that