Dealing With Information Cascades
Throughout Info 2040 I have been learning many concepts that explain large groups’ actions and how large groups deal with information. For the most part, importance or correctness can readily be evaluated by the breadth of people referencing or accepting a certain view. We have learned about Google’s page Rank system that ranks pages importance […]
10,000 friends liked this? Must be true!
https://civic.mit.edu/blog/erhardt/learning-from-political-experiments-and-information-cascades-on-facebook “Don’t follow the crowd; be yourself; don’t give into peer pressure!” These are phrases we’ve all grown up with; they are phrases that my mom has drilled into me ever since I could walk to school with my little group of neighborhood elementary school friends. Yet they are such prevalent phrases that most […]
“The Game” as an example of Strong Triadic Closure
I just lost The Game. The rules of The Game are simple: 1) If you think about, The Game, you have lost. 2) If you lose The Game, you must confess, out loud, that you have lost The Game. 3) The Game never stops. You are always either losing (by thinking about The Game), or not […]
Information Cascades in Online Movie Ratings
An information cascade is when a person observes the actions of others and follows what the others do regardless of any private information they receive. They often occur when people make decisions sequentially with the later people following the behavior of the previous people. Information cascades cause a kind of rational imitation where people infer […]
Conformity in Political Polls
The 2014 midterm election results have got people asking, why were the polls biased towards the Democrats? In fact, for a given election cycle, it’s common for the polls to be consistently biased towards one party, although that party is as likely to be the Democrats as the Republicans. One possible explanation is that some […]
Ebola and Viral Epidemics; False Results, False Future.
A quick Google search for Ebola and you will see a formal CDC statement, followed by article after article of sensationalist media. The statement reads: “Ebola is a rare and deadly disease caused by infection with a strain of Ebola virus. The 2014 Ebola epidemic is the largest in history, affecting multiple countries in West […]
Backing Off or Not
With the midterm elections just having finished, there have been many posts on Reddit regarding the government shutdown of last year. The article linked below actually was written before the “shutdown” occurred but it talks about how we got to the point and the effects of what would happen to Americans as a result. The […]
The Bandwagon Effect: Why Social Media Marketing is So Powerful
“Social media” is all the rage nowadays in marketing. Companies are quick to post their promotions on web outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. In fact, entire positions have been created for the sole purpose of managing these accounts. If you have ever surfed start-up strategy blogs, you will probably come across several articles […]
The Cost of Conformity
An information cascade occurs when it is most optimal for an individual to follow the behavior of other individuals without regard to his own information. This can be extended to the concept of people blindly “jumping on a bandwagon.” For instance, in 1935, Solomon Asch conducted an experiment regarding conformity; the subject signs up for […]
The 2008 Housing Bubble as Information Cascade
After the 2008 housing market collapse, many people asked, “How could this have happened?” The answer lies in information cascades as we have studied them in this class. Each person must decide whether or not to invest in the housing market. They have some internal information (some indicating that investing is a bad idea), about […]
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