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Grade School Fads

Do you ever wonder why fads are so common among grade school kids?  While they occur throughout all different age groups, fads occur more frequently among younger kids and become less common during one’s post college years. Bikhchandani Sushil, David Hirshleifer, and Ivo Welch’s article, “A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change as […]

Facebook starts Riots

When studying network effects, I immediately began to think of social media such as Facebook and Twitter and how strong those network effects are. In this article about the London riots in August, it paralleled the importance of social media in spreading uprisings around the world. This article drew a parallel between the riots-both started with […]

Information Cascade or Herd Behavior?

Every day we make numerous decisions that are highly influenced by others. Although we may not realize, these decisions are often influenced by those of others to the extent that we ignore our own opinion and follow the “herd” of society.   This phenomenon in which people make similar decisions based on hindsight, is labeled an […]

China’s Africa Strategy: Why an Information Cascade Could Undermine Chinese Interests in the Region:

China really is in a tough state, economically. With an entirely export reliant economy, their whole way of life could take a sharp downturn if it turns out that the United States or EU (if it still exists in a few years) stops buying China’s goods in the quantity that they currently do. As a […]

5 reasons why the all-new kindle fire beast the Ipad2

This article itself is the beginning of information cascade. Because the readers of the article assume that the writer had his hands on the product, the article appeals the readers with credibility. Now that the information is evaluated as reliable, readers take in the information and deliver a similar feedback to someone else; thus, the […]

Auction Sniping

Article: http://kuznets.fas.harvard.edu/~aroth/papers/equilibrium.geb.pdf In class, we learned that the dominant strategy for bidders in a second price sealed-bid private value auction is to bid their value. However, this may not always be the dominant strategy in auctions with a fixed end time (hard close auctions). This paper showed that perhaps “sniping” an auction, or placing a […]

Getting to a million: The madness of pre-ordering

There is no denying that the age of tablets is upon us. Once the domain of laptops and then netbooks, media consumption has migrated towards these small, portable devices with closed ecosystems. And yet with the entry of any new technology on the market there has to be a deal of skepticism. Sales always start slow, […]

The Dirty Little Secrets of Search

When you are searching online at Google, you may wonder how google searches all the websites and magically places results that are relevant to you on the top of the page. Google does it by using dozens criteria in search algorithm. Google described one crucial factor in detail: links from one site to another. This […]

Technology Enables Information Cascades

As evidenced by the article on the economist, with new technology, information cascades are a more common occurrence than ever. Social networking sites connect more people than would stay in contact if left to old fashioned devices such as snail mail or phone calls or even texts. This means that more channels of information is […]

The End of Nuclear Power – An Information Cascade

The recent disastrous earthquake that hit Japan caused many to immediately question the safety of nuclear power plants. Following the earthquake, damage to the Fukushima nuclear power plant caused radiation scares across the country, and much of the damage was hard to contain. Even today, experts are finding that radiation exists in high levels in […]

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