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Threshold and coordination models in the varying desirability of the Facebook internship

nytimes.com/2018/11/15/technology/jobs-facebook-computer-science-students.html With its hefty paychecks and renowned status, the Facebook internship is one of the most desired internships for software engineering students worldwide. But this may no longer be true in the future. Facebook has been the center of several political and privacy controversies for quite some time now, causing some students to no longer […]

Efficient Markets and the Wisdom of Crowds

Efficient markets and the Wisdom of Crowds In lecture, we discussed the idea of the the Wisdom of Crowds in the context of horse races. We began by outlining a model of betters (1…n) each with different beliefs and different wealth (w1… wn). The total wealth, then, becomes the sum of the wealth of each of […]

Bohemian Rhapsody is Back!

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/15/entertainment/bohemian-rhapsody-hot-100-chart/index.html One of Queen’s most famous songs, Bohemian Rhapsody is back on the Hot 100 taking the number 33 spot. Due to the recent release in November of the movie of the same name, Bohemian Rhapsody, that details the life of Freddie Mercury and the rest of the band, interest in the titular song has […]

Rise of TikTok Explained in Terms of Network Effects

We have been discussing network effects in markets and self fulfilling expectations equilibria and how this information can be used to market a product to become successful. TikTok, the new trending social platform for lip-syncing music videos, reached six million downloads on Apple’s App Store last month. (https://www.dailydot.com/debug/tiktok-app/) .The platform has been increasingly gaining popularity […]

Bayes’ Rule environmental applications

https://www.accessscience.com/content/applications-of-bayes-theorem-for-predicting-environmental-damage/YB100249 This article details the use of Bayes’ rule to predict and model how certain changes impact the natural environment in a specific region. Bayes’ theorem is used in predictive modeling via naive Bayes’ classifiers. This classifier predicts the probability an event happens givens some observed evidence. It is derived as follows. Bayes’ theorem states […]

A love-hate relationship with my friends

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ladamic/papers/groupdiffusion/GroupDiffusionSecondLife.pdf Is it love…is it hate, nobody knows. In an article written by David A. Huffaker, Chun-Yuen Teng, Matthew P. Simmons, Liuling Gong, Lada A. Adamic called Group Membership and Diffusion in Virtual Worlds they talk about the effects of network diffusion amongst friend groups. In the article, they state how there are two popular […]

Cascades of Failures in Interdependent Networks

We have so far learned information cascades in terms of diffusing certain information or certain behaviors throughout a network. We learned the mechanism behind how each individual’s behavior is influenced by its neighbors’ behaviors. However, this article examines the cascade of failures in interdependent networks. With the development of technology, the article argues that the […]

The Dynamics of Competing Cascades in Social Media: Applications to Agenda Setting

With the rise of fake news, many researchers are studying how different information cascades on social media compete with one another and more importantly, the methodology of how to contain such information cascades of fake news. Here, they view the spread of information as an epidemic model. The strategy that they use to contain a […]

Asymmetric Information in the Market for Health Insurance

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.103.7.2643 This academic paper is titled Adverse Selection and Inertia in Health Insurance Markets: When Nudging Hurts.  It was published in the American Economic Review explores consumer inertia and adverse selection in health insurance markets. This paper directly correlates to our discussion on asymmetric information in markets. The market for health insurance is a prime […]

Do companies know I’m a broke college student?

https://medium.com/@rwitt/why-income-targeting-is-bound-to-improve-your-social-ads-7e524dd2004b I’ve recently clicked on a few Facebook ads linking to companies whose clothes I cannot afford. From there, I started wondering if ads are (or can be) targeted towards not only age and education demographics but also income level. In short, does Facebook know I’m a poor college student? I found an article talking […]

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