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Google Switches to First-Price Auction

https://adexchanger.com/online-advertising/google-switches-to-first-price-auction/   In March of 2019, Google announced that it would shift towards a first-price auction for Google Ad Manager, which is Google’s publisher exchange and ad service product. Google was one of the last major publishers to shift to a first-price auction, nearly two years after other major exchanges began testing first-price auctions. As […]

Streaming service Disney+ will experience network effects

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/disney-already-has-10-million-subscribers-here-s-how-compares-n1081816?cid=public-rss_20191115 Earlier this week, Disney released a new streaming service called Disney+, which racked up over 10 million subscribers in the first 24 hours of its international launch. This figure of 10 million consists of people who signed up to pay for the plan regularly, people who signed up for the free 7-day trial, and […]

The Digital Information Cascade and its Influence on Power Structures

https://www.ft.com/content/6973e6d6-d047-11e7-9dbb-291a884dd8c6 Perhaps one of the most interesting phenomena to occur during the Trump presidency was the sudden outburst of sexual misconduct allegations that occurred in 2017. This left many people wondering, “Why are these scandals happening now? Why not when a progressive president sat in the White House?” To provide some context, prior to 2017, […]

Upvoting on social media sites like Reddit and others

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a9335/upvotes-downvotes-and-the-science-of-the-reddit-hivemind-15784871/   This article describes a study on how the concept of groupthink influences post popularity on Reddit, a popular website where members can create posts about certain topics and upvote/downvote other users’ posts/comments. Researchers conducted a voting aggregation experiment on a website very similar to Reddit. They wanted to see whether or not an […]

The Power of Information Cascade in Culture and Political Movement

https://www.ft.com/content/6973e6d6-d047-11e7-9dbb-291a884dd8c6   Information cascade has been ubiquitous; its power of application has been applied to many political events, especially tracing back to the 2017 Trump election. Americans still remembered the weeks before the election where waves of sexual harassment scandals have emerged. From Charlie Rose, TV interviewer for Davos set to the Democrat senator, Al […]

Power Law in Popular Media

https://medium.com/@michaeltauberg/power-law-in-popular-media-7d7efef3fb7c This article sheds light on the many industries that exhibit power laws. The author poses a question: why do power graphs seem to emerge within popular media? The answer lies in the fact that popularity is a network phenomenon. Therefore, it is subject to network effects. The power law arises, because an entry into […]

The Power Law in Sexual Networks

https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article/fileid=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1006748&type=printable Gonorrhea is a serious illness with a reported rate of almost one million cases a year in the United States and some cases in that number have reported resistance to antibiotics. Can the rate of gonorrhea be presented as a power law distribution over a given period of time? Well, sexual networks can because […]

The Power of Product Reviews

https://spiegel.medill.northwestern.edu/_pdf/Spiegel_Online%20Review_eBook_Jun2017_FINAL.pdf   The research article above details the influence of consumer ratings and reviews of products on sales. 95 percent of online shoppers(or aspiring consumers) read product reviews before making a purchase. Reviews are used by shoppers to gather information about a product – whether it will meet a particular need, is long-lasting, or will […]

American Economic System Demonstrates the “Rich Get Richer” Dynamic

Bloomberg recently reported that the top 1% wealthiest of the American population owns as much wealth as the entire middle class. Although yearly earnings for the American demographic has increased for most people, the rate of this growth is highly unequal. Data shows that the top fifth wealthiest Americans hold 88% of the entire country’s […]

Information Effects for Restaurant Reviews

https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/IJCHM-01-2018-0058/full/pdf?title=when-you-write-review-matters-the-interactive-effect-of-prior-online-reviews-and-review-temporal-distance-on-consumers-restaurant-evaluation   “The effect of… prior online reviews on consumers’ restaurant evaluation”. Li, et al. 2019.   The paper above considers the effect of prior online reviews and restaurant ratings on influencing consumers to try out restaurants and write their own reviews, which links to the topics of information-based benefits and cascades discussed in class. […]

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