Power Balance in a New Social Networking Site
Ello is a new social networking service that aims at being used only for social purposes. The goal in creating this new service was to eliminate advertisements and be mainly an outlet for “people posting interesting stuff,” and thus “the message of buy, buy, buy is toned down” with Ello. The problem with larger social […]
Crimea through a Game-Theory Lens
The phrase “history always repeats itself” is something that is commonly thrown around. However, the only way for us to prevent destructive, historic events from happening again is to truly understand the reasoning as to why they happened in the first place. Recently, the Russian occupation of Crimea proved to be somewhat similar to the […]
Using game theory for salary negotiation
Negotiation is often associated with the notion of being an art but along the course of this article, the logical and analytical components of negotiation are brought to the forefront. Although the arguments stated in this article can be applied to negotiation in most situations, in the interest of better explaining and articulating the insights […]
Lung Transplant Market Design
The exchange of organs for transplant patients is a market that does not involve the transfer of money. Although these markets do not have an exchange of money they can still be optimized. This optimization is called market design. Three economists, Haluk Ergin, Tayfun Sönmez and Utku Ünver, have devised an algorithm to find combinations […]
Internet Services and Filter Bubbles
A result of improved processing power is that it allowed Internet companies to analyze historic user behavior and filter a user’s future media based on complex analytic functions. These are used to investigate their previous browsing history and demographic properties. Web companies strive to tailor their services based on user tastes using machine-learning algorithms and […]
Chain Store Paradox
In the “chain store paradox”, proposed forty years ago by Reinhard Selten, chain stores must decide whether to fight emerging entrepreneurs with price wars or to simply coexist. By using game theory, Selten theorized that there were two possible options: 1) launching a price war with an emerging company to prevent others from joining the […]
Climate March Targets Wall Street
Last weekend, two protests pushing for climate change occurred in New York. After the Climate March on Sunday, Flood Wall Street on Monday resulted in arrests because protesters did not disperse as told by the police. Many of the protesters believe that the world has not viewed our contribution to climate change and its detrimental effects […]
Game Theory and Technology
While results from social scientists about game theory, especially equilibrium and markets, have been viewed as important, engineers did not apply them to their work. Now it seems we have reached a point where engineers will rely more on game theory to solve problems. It does seem like it will be applicable. Many problems can […]
Game Theory in Genetics
When it comes to natural selection, the phrase “survival of the fittest” generally means that the organisms that are best adapted to their respective environments will survive and pass on their genes to future generations. While this is mostly true, a recent study shows that genetic diversity may be more important than fitness. This discovery […]
Old Foes To Bitter Allies
In the past couple of months we have seen the rise of a cancerous group known as ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria). It is not clear where they originated from, nor how they stealthily spread so fast right under the nose of all global watchers in such a connected world that we live […]
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