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Innovative Online Advertising – Watch out Google!

The article/blog piece I will be discussing in my blog today is: http://paidcontent.org/2012/11/06/the-20-ad-campaign-small-businesses-find-alternatives-to-google-adwords/   This article focuses on the dilemma small companies are facing in online advertising. As Google’s online advertising service becomes more and more popular, the rates for advertising are also increasing. Now, small companies that no longer have the financial clout to […]

Going against the grain

Japan is known to be progressive in the realm of social trends. Once again, they have created an attention grabbing phenomena. Japanese artist and big name in the “modcon” body art world, Keroppy, has topped some of his past innovations with an act called “bagelheading”. In this temporary body modification, about 400cc of saline is […]

Political Prediction Markets and Manipulation

For many armchair politicos, prediction markets have become ubiquitous resources, more so than even daily tracking polls. Prediction markets work by setting market prices, usually between $0 and $1 (or $0 and $10.00) on binary event contracts. For example, Intrade.com runs multiple current markets for the U.S. Presidential election, but the two most popular contracts […]

2012 Presidential Campaign and the Importance/Value of a Vote

Political campaigns have changed by leaps and bounds over the past few decades.  In today’s day and age, most of their top marketing techniques revolve around the use of the Internet and ads.  They base their amount that they will pay on ads upon how much they would pay for a single vote, paying more […]

The Labor Market and Information Cascades

An important fact to note is that information cascades do not involve individuals mindlessly imitating the behavior of others. Rather, they occur because individuals draw rational inferences from limited information, a major part of which includes observations about the behavior of others. This phenomenon also applies to the labor market where employers receive signals about […]

iPad Mini Release Disappointing

This article is about the launch of Apple’s new product: the iPad Mini.  It has all the features of the iPad but scaled to a smaller size.  The small size is intended to attract consumers who cannot afford the high price of the regular iPad.  However, the price of the iPad Mini is still significantly […]

Information Cascades and the Effect on Third Party Candidates

by Kaycee As the 2012 presidential race comes to a close, I have realized my disappointment with the lack of attention third parties have received.  Despite the fact that third parties have views that appear to be more aligned with the views of the majority (middle class) versus the extreme views held by both Democrat and […]

Industries’ Conversion Value by Google’s AdWords

Business2Community wrote an article couple days ago about Google’s AdWords. The author of this article did some research on the conversion rate and cost per conversion of AdWords for different industries. Different customers define “conversions” differently. But generally, each industry defines it similarly, so this article reports the average conversion rate data for the top […]

A Flaw in the Wisdom of the Crowds?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/sunday-review/when-the-crowd-isnt-wise.html?_r=0 This article presents us with the interesting idea that the “wisdom of the crowds,” a term coined by James Surowiecki in his 2004 book may not be as reliable as most people take it to be—especially in the context of predicting the outcome of markets. In the case of the Supreme Court’s decision on […]

Explaining riots with information cascades.

Los Angeles in 1992 was struck hard by race riots.  Rodney King had been beaten by police officers who were concerned about their personal safety.  The beating spread viral through news media organizations and shortly after the officers were acquitted of police brutality charges Los Angeles was engulfed in race riots.  30 minutes after the […]

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