Information Cascades and Viral Videos
Cutting and pasting a URL into an email occurs 10 times more often than any other type of sharing. Our Sharing Peak Day and Hour occurs Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. and most users click 2 minutes after the content is shared. According to our textbook, an information cascade has the potential to occur when people […]
Game Theory in Sports
In August 2010 a University of Miami football booster named Nevin Shapiro claimed that he had violated NCAA rules by providing cash as well as other goods to former Miami football athletes. Nearly a year later, while conducting an interview with Yahoo Sports, Shapiro went on to reveal the names of certain players that received […]
Information Cascades and Presidential Campaigns
http://www.duke.edu/~jcr12/Rickershauser_Aldrich_FINAL%20VERSION.pdf http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pawlenty-drops-presidential-race-disappointing-straw-poll-finish/story?id=14301520#.TrhJHEMUqso The 2012 Republican primaries are quickly approaching. With this comes a constant flood of information and news stories about the GOP Presidential candidates. Included in many media and personal discussions about the candidates are questions about a candidate’s standings in the polls and their chances of securing the nomination, and their likelihood of […]
Applying Information Cascades to Revolutions and Rioting
The article “Riots, revolutions, democratisation, and information cascades” by Chris Ellis and John Fender (http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/7156) explores the idea that modern technology can be used as the driving force for revolutions, rioting, and other modern movements due to the increased transmission of information enabled by the technology; this increased spread of information causes an information cascade, […]
Residency Program Matching as a Two-Sided Matching Market
In medical education, residency is a three- to six-year training program that medical students must complete at a postgraduate hospital. Until the 1940s, the market suffered from a Prisoner’s Dilemma problem in which competition by hospitals for residents resulted in a race to fill residency positions earlier and earlier in a medical student’s career. This […]
Decision Making Across Cultures
The area of decision making that we predominantly analyze in lecture is the predictability of other decisions based on a set of data, either based on their given values or choices. The TED Talk video by Sheena Iyengar that I am going to discuss is about the actual psychology behind decision making. What Iyengar concludes […]
Information Cascade and Network Effects as seen on Online Shopping
http://www.retailgazette.co.uk/articles/30122-social-networks-affect-consumer-decisionmaking In this blog post, I’ll be relating a short article, published last month in Britain, to the principles of Information Cascade and Network Effects we’ve been talking about recently. In Chapter 16 we learned how being connected in a network can allow for your behaviors and decisions to be influenced by others. We also […]
The 99 Percent
In Jeremy Brecher’s article, “The 99 Percent Organize Themselves”, the author reports his experience with the current “99 percent movement”. He states that originally it started as the “Occupy Wall Street(OWS)” movement in Zucotti Park. However, as companion movements spread across the country started to collaborate, the OWS morphed into the 99 percent movement. He […]
Google launches major tweaks in formula to refine searches
http://www.livemint.com/2011/11/06222557/Google-launches-major-tweaks-i.html?atype=tp This article is about the way that Google uses and constantly changes certain algorithms to update its search engine and the effectiveness of its searching services. According to the article, a new algorithm was created that allowed Google to update its search engine up to the very minute of searching. In the past, Google […]
“If Joey jumped off a bridge would you jump too?” An Introduction to the Selection Versus Influence Problem in the Social Sciences.
In my previous article I wrote about the work of Nicholas Christakis. In his book, Connected, Christakis argues that variables such as gaining weight or becoming happy are party due to a social process called contagion. Broadly speaking, this theory states that your position in a social network can affect the sorts of traits that […]
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