Google’s efforts to increase mobile ad prices
As we can expect, much of Google’s revenue comes from ad clicks. Google made more than $15 billion during the first quarter this year, with their ad revenue reaching $10.5 billion according to their earnings report. This however, fell short of expectations. This could be due to the fact that the advertising industry is shifting […]
Solomon Asch Experiment
In 1951, Solomon Asch devised an experiment to study the tendency for humans to conform. In his experiment, eight to ten people were seated around a table and asked to determine which bar on the right card as seen below, most closely matches the bar on the left card as seen below. The bars on […]
Overconfident Entrepeneurs Can Break Information Cascades
An article by Antonio E. Bernardo and Ivo Welch titled “On the Evolution of Overconfidence and Entrepreneurs” details the behaviors of entrepreneurs in groups, and how that affects the groups actions. As discussed in class information cascades can form off very little actual information. Everyone in a group can often rationally ignore their own personal information if the rest of […]
Consequences of Selling Lower Than Market-Clearing Price
Ten years ago, Google first debuted in the stock market. Investors complained that they received only approximately 75% of the stock they were willing to buy as a result of a modified Dutch auction. Google decided to sell its stock via a modified Dutch auction, in which the stock was sold at a price less […]
The Fall of Facebook
Facebook has risen out of the blue, becoming a success story practically overnight. Facebook then stayed as the giant of social media for over five years. One question has always followed Facebook through its reign: “Will it end?” A couple of years ago Facebook looked like it would never end, but now Facebook looks like […]
Bayes’ Theorem in Politics
This article uses Bayes’ Theorem to evaluate Emerging Democratic Majority (EDM) theory. EDM theory states that recent changes in society are causing a push towards support of the Democratic party over the Republican party. The idea of realignment in general suggests that roughly every three decades, one party becomes dominant over the other. EDM theory […]
Attempting to Avoid Baseless Information Cascades
In class we discussed the basics of information cascades and how exactly they get started. In the article “Arresting Irrational Information Cascades,” Robert Wiblin goes more in depth about information cascades. He explores where they come from in terms of general human behavior and also gives a few suggestions on how to avoid information cascades […]
Information Cascades as an Explanation of Revolutions
Christopher Ellis and John Fender wrote a paper published in The Economic Journal detailing a model that predicts the likelihood of a “regime transition” based on the economic situation of the country and how the information about the economy are spread throughout two classes. The model splits society into a rich class that is an […]
Neural Networks
In class, we discussed a simple Pagerank algorithm. The intent of that iterative algorithm is to converge on some set of ‘page ranks’ by propagating node’s values to each other. Neural networks are in some ways the inverse of that method – instead of converging on some value of interest, often Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) […]
The Price of Your House May Not Be Market Clearing
Source: Austrialian Financial Review http://www.afr.com/f/free/blogs/christopher_joye/why_capitalism_is_not_doing_its_2jQRxPhxWW8HivdgmnOz4J Contemporary capitalism is in jeopardy, and it’s because recent democracy have been rejecting the central idea of capitalism: creative destruction created by free functioning market, which is the main driver for productivity and economic growth. The shocking news: the equities, bonds, and housing prices that we see today are not […]
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