International Reactions to Google’s Adwords
We see in this article that some people can receive adverse effects of the ad policy that Google has adopted regarding advertisers. This article features a case filed by the firm Bharat Matrimonial which is filing a case against the Indian government regarding Google’s Adwords policy which it finds restrictive and discriminatory. According to this […]
Strongly Connected Components in Congress
With the congressional election season ending yesterday, we have seen a lot of change in this country’s political affiliations, especially by state. Voters in a majority of the states holding congressional elections yesterday voted for GOP leaders, lending to a newly Republican Senate. This is vastly different from a liberal political landscape a few years […]
Contagion Modeling in Plague Inc.
The outbreak of a disease. One of the most credible threats to the longevity of the human species. James Vaughan of Ndemic Creations had a vision to make a game out of the potential extinction of mankind. Plague Inc. for iPhone (note: there is now a Plague Inc: Evolved for PC and Mac) puts players in […]
Information Cascades and Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is a phenomenon that uses the “wisdom of the crowd” to perform tasks that would be onerous for an individual to do alone. However, the openness of problems solved via crowdsourcing makes them especially vulnerable to effects of information cascades. Information cascades can have a positive effect on crowdsourcing. For instance, in the 2011 […]
Information Cascades in Stocks
The information cascade is a concept that affects many real-world situations. One situation highlighted by The Economist in an article called “Information Cascades” is the stock market. Information cascades are defined in the article as the result of people making decisions based on their observations of other peoples’ actions. The first example of information cascades […]
Tech Companies’ competitive advantage – Bayes Rule and Behavioral Economics
Bayes Rule was discovered by Thomas Bayes and presented to the scientific community in 1763. It is the mathematical relationship between probabilities and is updated when new information is brought forward. Today technology is rapidly growing as Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics is developed and improved. Most people then, would be shocked to find out […]
Information Cascades in Revolutions
Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites have become an increasingly powerful tool for those facing oppression. These social media outlets are tools of an information cascade, in which protesters increase their ranks following a successful protest or rally. When a bystander observes a successful demonstration, he is more likely to join the protesters at […]
Customs and Cascades
Sanctions on deviants, positive payoff externalities, conformity preference, and communication constitute the four mechanisms of uniform behavior; however, they each fail to acknowledge the possibility of erroneous behaviors and the brittle nature of the uniform nature in general. In the Journal of Political Economy, then, authors Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer, and Ivo Welch offer “an […]
Web Interconnectedness and Information Cascades: The Spread of False Information
Information propagates extremely quickly in today’s web-centric culture. The new metric of virality judges the speed and reach to which something spreads online. Posts or videos are shared around and gather huge levels of exposure. However, there is no guarantee that these ideas are correct or even sourced properly. In her article “Anatomy of a […]
Information Cascades and Rebellion:
In the article “Riots, Revolution, Democratization, and Information Cascades,” Chris Ellis and John Fisher assert that the basic root of all political uprising is information cascades. The article beings by portraying a stylized version of this theory: workers decide whether or not to rebel based on other workers behavior as well as the presence of […]
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