Facebook Ads for Small Businesses
The price of ads on Facebook increased as the number of ad impressions (number of ads displayed) decreased, leading to Facebook ad revenue increase. Facebook argues that the price that is paid for the ad slot correlates to the value it generates for the company. However, small businesses have experienced a greater increase in ad […]
The Sad Fate of Political Parties
American politics will always be ruled by a two-party system. There is no space in the political structure for a third party to ever rise into a measurable amount of influence. There are many reasons why 3rd party candidates will never, unless by some fluke or collective chance, achieve presidency. For one, no one is […]
What causes languages to go extinct?
While the English-speaking population has grown to include people all over the world, there are a large number of languages that are being spoken by fewer and fewer people and are in danger of going extinct–about a quarter of the world’s languages could have no native speakers in the near future. Recent research shows that […]
Removing Yourself From a Network is Not the Answer
Sometime mid-October, Copyblogger, an educator on content marketing deleted their Facebook page, leaving almost 27,000 fans. While this was a calculated decision, and there were several understandable reasons for this move, linked in the first website below, many people responded by criticizing it as a huge mistake. For Copyblogger, their page on Facebook was not […]
Can Uber leverage the network effect?
In class, we discussed network effects, specifically in technological adoption. For instance, one’s decision to purchase a fax machine is dependent on how many others are utilizing this same technology to allow for an effective mode of communication. A more current example would be how one might consider the number of their contacts who use […]
Information Cascades in Runescape Polls
Or really, the lack thereof. To put it briefly, Runescape is a MMORPG (massively-multiplayer online role-playing game) that no doubt a vast number of college students have at the very least heard about, or even played for some period of time. Earlier this year, Jagex released the “Power to the Players” poll system, to allow […]
Information Cascades in Reality
As discussed in class, information cascades are often fragile. This is because they are based on relatively little genuine information and therefore can also be overturned by very little information. People in cascades are aware often aware that the behavior of most other individuals do not reflect their true knowledge, and thus any injection of […]
5 Monkeys; The Primitive Cascade
If you watch 5 Monkeys Video, you’ll see a psychological experiment performed on a group of monkeys. Five monkeys are put into a cage, and a banana is placed at the top of a staircase. When a monkey goes to take the banana, the other four monkeys in the cage are sprayed with cold water. After […]
Human Error in the Urn Game
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1093/ei/39.4.609/asset/ei%25252f39.4.609.pdf?v=1&t=i28bxn97&s=8225525c7a67bc97b8953718478c6da01bff8d5e In class, one of the applications for Bayes’ Rule we discussed was to calculate probabilities in the urn game. That is, say we have an urn with red and blue marbles inside, two of one color and one of the other color, with a 1/2 chance of either color being the majority. If we […]
#Hashtag
http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/history-hashtag-social-marketing_b59753 The world has seen the increased presence of social media in our daily lives develop over the past several years. In addition to Facebook, the popularity of social media sites such as Twitter and Instagram has greatly increased. One common thing across many forms of social media is the use of the hashtags. The […]
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