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Braess’ Paradox in Basketball

At the conclusion of our study of game theory, the concept of Braess’ Paradox was introduced. As stated in the textbook, Braess’ Paradox is the idea that “adding resources to a network can sometimes hurt performance at equilibrium.” Initially, this phenomenon comes across as counterintuitive, but through examples, it makes sense why this can be […]

Page Rank Viewed from Mobile and Non-Standard Perspectives

First page search rankings are no guarantee of success: here’s why   http://www.travolution.co.uk/articles/2015/10/02/13555/searchmetrics-analysis-reveals-why-pages-can-rank-higher-on-mobile-than-desktop.html   In class, we discussed how webpages can be “ranked” based upon how many sites link to them, and how relevant each of these sites is to the topic being dealt with. The articles being discussed in this post describe how sites […]

The Best Tennis Players of All Time

In class, we have discussed Google PageRank, which was first invented in 1998 to analyze connections among web sites for the purpose of ordering search results. However, PageRank can be used for many other reasons as well. Whenever there exists a graph, which is math concept representing the relationship between a set of objects, PageRank can order these […]

Indie vs Major

When it comes time for a musician to sign a deal, they always have to make the big decision: major label or indie? The musician is placed in the middle of a bargain exchange network. There was a time when major labels held significantly more bargaining power than independent labels. Let’s say that there is […]

Facebook Ads API and Exchange: Closing In On Conversion

Ads, ads, they are everywhere! I first started using Facebook in 2008, and I don’t remember as many ads on my home page as I see now. Well why? First, many conglomerates like Google and Yahoo, have learned to capitalize their profits on ads in bidding for slots, especially Facebook. Second, the usage of data […]

Why Auctioneers

We have been discussing auctions under the assumption that everyone bids rationally, meaning that if there is a dominant strategy then the bidders will follow it. I was thinking about when this might or might not actually be the case, and how it might affect the auction. A Slate article, “Why Do Auctioneers Talk Like […]

Bargaining: An Entrepreneur’s Power Struggle

Bargaining is the process of two or more individuals engaging in a back an forth debate to try and settle the basis of a mutually beneficial exchange, where all of the parties involved retain positive incentives from the service or product at hand (in short it is a type of negotiation where the buyer and seller […]

Net Neutrality and Game Theory

I have recently become interested in the net neutrality debate that seems to be receiving a lot of press. Network neutrality is the idea that the Internet is a utility that Internet service providers should give access to without discriminating against certain sources or content. It is also called the “open Internet”, the idea that all […]

Forging the Friendship Network

In Networks 2040, the topic of balanced relationships was addressed. A relationship is balance if it contains a (+, +, +) or a (+, -,-). The triangle of all friends is inherently balanced as everyone has a positive relationship with each other. The triangle with two pairs of not friends and one pair of friends […]

Width of the World Wide Web

At the turn of the 21st century, several research groups independently studied the concept of interconnectedness popularized by ‘six degrees of separation’ in the context of the World Wide Web. In this post, I will take a look at a specific study done by Albert, Jeong & Barabási at the University of Notre Dame. The study […]

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