Information Cascades and Housing Bubbles
One of the highly discussed questions in modern economics is how the real estate bubble formed and how no one realized what was happening until it burst. People have blamed a variety of causes rooted in many different fields, some of which include subprime loans, insufficient regulation, and excessive speculation. While it is likely that […]
Game Theory: Saab Survives
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/28/us-saab-idUSTRE79R1MZ20111028 Two Chinese companies Pang Da and Youngman will purchase Saab for 100 million euro ($141 million) to save it from bankruptcy. Swedish Automobile (formerly Spyker Cars) bought Swedish car maker Saab from General Motors in 2010 hoping to expand the Swedish automotive industry. Less than 2 years later, Saab is struggling to produce cars […]
Fast & Competitive Social Networking
Source: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/red-balloons-study-102811.html Two years ago, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency created a competition to test “social networking’s potential to solve widely distributed, time-sensitive problems.” To do this, they set up 10 red weather balloons around the United States, and offered over 4,000 teams $40,000 to be the first to locate the GPS coordinates of […]
Unthink: a bold new approach to information privacy in social networking
A new startup social networking platform named “Unthink” launched early last week. The company is hoping to seriously challenge Facebook, Google+, and other established social networking sites on a platform of “emancipation” to its users. Unthink was founded on the idea that mainstream social networking sites have too much control over the information that their […]
Information Cascades: The Nature of Crime and P2P File-Sharing
In another course I’m taking this semester, Digital Business Strategy, we have recently been discussing copyright law and its application to peer-to-peer (P2P) filing sharing, specifically related to the music industry. P2P networks facilitate direct exchange of files between users without the need for mediation by a centralized server. It’s through these networks that the […]
Network Effect
Network Effect As we stroll across the Web 2.0 world, we see that the World Wide Web has become so much more than a platform that only retrieves information. Now it has created a stage for people to participate in information sharing and collaboration. However, the demand for social media, mobile services, online videos, blog […]
Foursquare: A New Method of Advertising
Foursquare is a relatively new social networking tool that has recently gained popularity among smartphone users. Users of foursquare use a smartphone app to “check in” to locations which they visit (using the geo-locational abilities of the phone’s GPS to ensure they are within a reasonable distance of the location). The user who checks in […]
How to “Google Bomb”: Gaming the PageRank Algorithm
Ever wondered how to game the Google Page Rank algorithm to pull off some hilarious world-wide pranks? I’m sure you’ve heard of similar terms such as photo bomb – where (as defined by urban dictionary) “the background of the picture hijacks its original focus.” Similarly, a Google bomb is an irrelevant website that somehow ranks […]
College Admissions as a Matching Market
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/24/colleges-with-the-lowest-_n_1028153.html As college students, we are all familiar with the college admissions process. In applying for college and deciding which to attend, most of us had to consider first our values of the colleges we wanted to apply to and which ones were willing to accept us. This system can be modeled as a matching […]
NBA Lockout
Two weeks of the NBA season have already been cancelled and the entire month of November stands to be scrapped if the players and owners cannot reach an agreement soon. The main issues at hand are revenue sharing, salary cap and the types of contracts teams can offer their players. While it is the shared […]
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