Is the change in Course Registration in Harvard due to information cascade?
College course registration is both a concerning and fascinating part of every college students. And among the many courses that are offered by each college, some courses attract most students. There is generally no apparent explanation for why some courses draw so many people unless the courses are required. However, the attraction of many students […]
Escaping the Herd in Online Social Networks
This article is about the underlying assumption that many social media advertisers have about online social interactions: that information cascades reign supreme in the ways that people interact on social media platforms. However, according to Sun, Zhang and Zhu’s study on the social networks, they believe that there are confounding factors that disprove this. To […]
Elections and Information Cascades
Voting in the presidential election is a highly publicized event by the media every four years. We all know that on Election Day, every single media outlet is giving live updates of the polls and who’s in the lead/ how far in the lead. This shows people who haven’t voted yet, who everyone else in […]
Information Cascade and the Ice Bucket Challenge
Information cascade is a phenomenon in which people who are connected by a network “follow the crowd” and have their actions influenced by their observation of other people’s actions. When we first started discussing about information cascades, I started thinking about a variety of social movements and how information cascade played a pivotal role in […]
Herd Mentality in investment
In class, we talked about how people tend to follow the beliefs of the crowd instead of making their own rational decisions. This decision-overriding factor of the crowd, or herd mentality, has become so pervasive in our lives that we need to consider if such information cascade is beneficial or detrimental to our lives. This […]
Application of Bayes’ Rule in Positioning
The article discusses various positioning technologies, including using conditional probability to calculate Bayesian positioning and determine the dependency between signal indicators and locations. Over the years, various localization technologies have been used to determine locations of people and devices in an absolute or relative sense. Relative positioning methods determine a location relative to another one […]
The Network Effect in Computer Programming Languages
One of the key concepts covered in this class is the direct benefit effect, also known as the network effect. This phenomenon is used to explain certain behaviors within populations that stem from positive externality, in which the welfare of an individual is affected by the actions of other individuals. Examples of this effect include […]
Content Marketing Meets Digital World
Entering the 21st century, technology is advancing at an amazing speed. Yet, technology is not a self-contained system per se; none of it can be accepted by billions of users without successful marketing. Indeed, marketing and technology are mutually shaping: technology diffuses with marketing, while today’s marketing requires extensive understanding of our digital world. Speaking […]
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