Twitter and information cascades
Twitter is one of the most popular social networking sites today. Its users post tweets, short messages of up to 140 characters containing a variety of content. As a very dynamic communication medium spreading breaking news, emergency broadcasts, marketing and many more. However, the article from the New York Times, describes the negative effect of […]
Bandwagoning and the 2014 Congressional Election
On November 4th, 2014, United States citizens went to the voting booths to vote in the 2014 Congressional Election. The Republicans won control of America’s Senate for the first time in eight years and increased their majority in the House of Representatives for a very successful round of voting. Much of the reason for the […]
Information Cascades, Word of Mouth Marketing, Astroturfing, and Viral Internet Content
Sources: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/april/viral-photo-cascade-040314.html, http://www.forbes.com/sites/kimberlywhitler/2014/07/17/why-word-of-mouth-marketing-is-the-most-important-social-media/, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/26/secret-to-viral-video-marketing What exactly makes an image or video go viral on the Internet? Oftentimes I’ll be on Facebook or sitting with friends and all of a sudden my news feed will show something a friend of mine shared. Oftentimes it’ll be a popular music video or a funny clip no more than 3 seconds long, […]
Information Cascades and Stocks
The paper I read is titled “Institutional Herding and Information Cascades: Evidence from daily trades”, by Susan Christoffersen and Ya Tang from McGill University. This paper piqued my interest as I am interested in finance and the stock markets, and furthermore the markets are something that many people are familiar with. Seeing the stock charts […]
Information Cascades, False Deaths, and Revenue
http://www.people.com/article/macaulay-culkin-death-hoax-instagram Every few months, word gets around that a celebrity, politician, or well-known person of some sort has died in some unfortunate way. Depending on the quality of the fabrication, millions of people can fall for such a ruse, even though the information is completely incorrect. However, after closer examination or a short amount of […]
Ponzi Schemes
The growth and perpetuation of Ponzi schemes are grounded heavily in information cascades. Many of the most distinctive properties of information cascades are embedded in Ponzi schemes. Ponzi schemes, like cascades, are unstable and based on little information. They are also built on incorrect/incomplete knowledge. Information about a fund’s investments and returns are passed from […]
Frozen: Information Cascade to Success
What makes a movie popular? How do certain movies capture our society while others fail to generate the same profit? Movies are complicated. Their success can be attributed to their cast, directors and producers, marketing, and often times the “buzz” they create. While movie production teams are aware of the quality and name recognition of […]
Information Cascade in Hive-minds
Nature has many examples of animals who exhibit swarming, or hive-mind-like, behavior. Swarms are typically made up of hundreds, if not thousands, of individual organisms that act as one to achieve a goal that they could not normally accomplish alone. Some animals that swarm include schools of fish, flocks of birds, and insects. Particularly, bees […]
Information Cascades and the Statler Auditorium Upper Deck Exit Plan
Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday my friend and I sit in the upper deck of the Statler Auditorium for Networks. There’s always more seats if you get to class late, and the projection is just about at eye level if you sit in the right place. Our only issue with sitting in the upper deck […]
Obama’s Stance on Net Neutrality
Net Neutrality is a belief that everything on the internet should be treated equally by service providers and they should not have the ability to charge different users based on content, platform, or mode of communication. Internet service providers are trying to offer Internet “fast lanes” to sites willing to pay an extra fee, which […]
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