Information Cascades in Financial Markets
An information cascade occurs when people, regardless of their individual insights, observe and then follow the actions of others. This phenomenon is common and is readily apparent in an array of different circumstances – one of which being the herd-like behavior of investors in financial markets. Investors tend to follow the consensus and often tailor […]
Starbucks to Buy Teavana for $620 Million
The coffee tycoon now will expand its inventory and incorporate tea as part of its sells, believing strongly that the success they found in coffee will expand to tea. Starbucks estimates that the tea market at approximately $40 billion and growing, so increasing its presence in this market would greatly increase its sales from its […]
Conditional Probability in the Courtroom
In his NYTimes Opinionator series titled Elements of Math, author Steven Strogatz writes about the often perplexing topic of conditional probability, which we know from class as the “probability that some event A happens, given the occurrence of another event B.” He notes that because this is such a “slippery” concept, it is often misused […]
Google Changes Search Algorithm
Google recently made some big changes to its search algorithm. An article from CNN talks about the effects it has on businesses, positive and negative. In the past, Google’s changes have been slight and barely noticeable, but this adjustment as an attempt to push higher quality sites to the top of the lists has made […]
A Green Amazon?
Amazon is following a new crowd: the environmental, eco-friendly, tree hugging crowd. Two months ago, they started a new shopping site called Vine.com that sells green products. “Products must fall into one of the following categories: they must be designed to remove toxins, energy-efficient, natural, organic, powered by renewable energy, reusable, made of sustainable materials […]
Birds of a Feather
After reading a fellow blog post regarding ants and how they communicate with one another, I began wondering not just about ants, but about other types of swarms- specifically those who stay in large congregations as a method of defense. For instance, flocks of birds or schools of fish- how do they communicate with each […]
Do Software Companies Profit from Piracy?
Whether it’s a shoddily recorded taping of a new Twilight film being peddled on a Vietnamese street corner, a newly released Taylor Swift Album being seeded on bitTorrent, or copy of “Moonrise Kingdom” being transferred from one Cornell student to another by way of an on-campus file-sharing application, piracy prevails. The government recently tried to […]
Why eSports might not succeed
Recently, MLG (major league gaming) released an info graphic about the growth of their stream viewers. Over the past two years, the number of people who watch their tournaments online has grown to 11 million viewers. This is great news in the world of eSports, as it shows that there is a place where eSports […]
Influence and Passivity in Social Media
Twitter is now one of the hottest social networking and micro-blogging service. According to a report, there are approximately 20 million active adult twitter users, the users who are more than 18 year old and access Twitter via any platform at least monthly. According to a recent report, an average twitter user has 126 followers. […]
Black Hatting the Algorithm
In February 2011, if you were to search for “living room furniture” in Google at 7 PM, J. C. Penny would show up as the number one result. If you were to do the same search two hours later, J. C. Penny would appear as the 68th result. What caused the sudden drop in ranking? […]
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