The Reality of Virtual Economies
In 2010 Valve Software introduced a trading feature to one of their most successful video games Team Fortress 2 (generally called TF2). This first person shooter is an online multiplayer game that incorporates cosmetic items in its cartoony art style. These cosmetic items, despite having no impact on actual gameplay, grew in popularity within the […]
Advertising On Mobile Platforms
The science of advertising and consumer behavior is undoubtedly one of the most important elements of successful business performance in today’s media-dominated world. 1920’s celebrity Will Rogers once said, “One ad is worth more to a paper than forty editorials.” This quotation emphasizes the true power of advertising, and given the time period in which […]
Frankenstorm & Cornell
Information cascade is the progression of decision making based the choices of previous participants. According to Wikipedia, “A cascade develops, then, when people abandon their own information in favor of inferences based on earlier people’s actions.” Some important characteristics of an information cascade are: they may not always be right, they can be based on […]
Small Players Seek Alternative to the Expense of Pay-Per-Click
In recent decades, we’ve witnessed a rapid pace of technological developments, one of which is a wide use of internet and the online markets. Many of people’s dream working places, such as Google and Facebook, are the titans of the digital world. Possessing millions of users, meaning millions of potential buyers, those companies make most […]
Brief Perspectives on Information Cascades: Stock Market, Technological Innovation and the Evolutionary Approaches
Information Cascades are fairly common occurrences as discussed in section; the explanation is simple, people tend to follow other people under the assumption that their predecessor has made a knowledgeable and well deliberated decision. While in many cases going to a more full restaurant even after reading reviews which recommend a less full one might […]
information cascade
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/technology/google-shopping-competition-amazon-charging-retailers.html This news article is recent and deals with the topic on e-commerce. Google is competing with Amazon for the “web’s most popular mall” title. Even though Google is a search site, it is developing into a useful e-commerce with a variety of products. It is also making changes to improve even more to […]
Higher Click-Through Rates on Facebook Ads
In a recent article called “Higher Click-Through Rates on Facebook Ads Drive Advertisers and Revenue to the Social Network,” Sankrant Sanu discusses the effectiveness of Facebook ads, which directly relates to the earnings of Facebook. When he noted that Facebook has a lot of growth potential, a commenter asked what would happen if advertisers found […]
Bayes Rule
Founded by Thomas Bayes, Bayes’ Rule is “initial beliefs + recent objective data = a new and improved belief.” In other words, it is the mathematic approach that explains how to combine new data with existing data. Bayes’ rule is often written as formula: P (A|B) = P (B|A) P (A) / P (B) when […]
Neanderthals and Netflix
Information cascades happen all around us, and as humans it has been part of our DNA since we were living in caves. As the Milgram et al. experiment in the 1960’s demonstrated about pedestrians’ likelihood of looking up at the sky when other people are doing so, humans use behavioral cues from others to determine […]
Google search today: more personal than PageRank
Google search is no longer simply based on a single universal algorithm. As a result of personalization, two searchers are likely to see two different sets of results. For instance, if a user consistently searches queries related to Cornell, Googling something like “computer science” will likely deliver them a link to Cornell University’s CS Department […]
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