Education as a Signal in Job Market
There may be no market more important to college students than the job market, especially for the students of Class of 2016. Things were very different a few years back, when my sister graduated in Class of 2008. According to this Wall Street Journal blog post, 201 employers from the National Association of Colleges and […]
Analyzing Behavior on a personal level
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/11/knowing-how-you-make-decisions-is-important.html Having seen in class how popular consensus and societal pressure shaped people’s decision making, I was intrigued to find this article detailing how individual decision making is analyzed. This article describes how people fall into two types of categories: the maximizers and the satisficers. The article also asserts that it’s better to make a decision […]
Rich Get Richer in Hotel Loyalty Programs
As the hotel giant Marriott buys out the smaller Starwood hotel chain, the benefits of the Starwood Perferred Guest loyalty program will be shifted towards the top elite. As excess rooms are in limited supply, those who are most loyal get the rooms. This creates a competition between customers on how loyal they are to […]
Network Effects and Social Networks in Mobile P2P Transfers
Venmo is a mobile payment service that allows users to settle small transactions between friends and is aimed at reducing the awkwardness and hassle of getting other people to pay you back for splitting bills and vice versa. It is by far the most successful mobile P2P money transmitter and single handedly forged a new […]
Attracting Users: Freemium Games
In recent years, a new gaming phenomenon has come onto the scene: freemium, or free-to-play, games. These popular apps have taken over the app store, people’s lives, and people’s bank accounts. “Free-to-play” is somewhat of a misnomer, because although these games are technically free, there are countless in-app purchases that result in billions of dollars […]
Obesity as a cascade effect
There are many real life scenarios that can be modeled as cascading network effects. Obesity, for example, spreads in a very similar way to the network effects we have seen in class. There are even specific cascading quotients that occur. You could look at groups of friends as clusters of nodes. As groups of friends […]
Social media and threshold
Nowadays, with an increase usage of smartphones, the number of social networks users also dramatically increased. And because there are so many people utilizing such service, more and more studies are being done on social network behaviors. In fact, the first article that I found is an example of such study on social network and people’s […]
Bayes’ Theorem in Spam Filtering
The idea behind Bayes’ Theorem, as we saw in class, is quite simple — change your expectations based on any new information that you receive. However, if applied wisely, the same idea can be used to great effect. One application of the theorem that all of us benefit from (sometimes unknowingly) is that of spam […]
Why People Buy Beats Headphones
On the face of it, buying Beats seems like a very bad deal. With just a little bit of research, you can easily find cheaper alternatives that have better reviews. Even in this article by Consumer Reports, a very reputable reviewer, they say, “In almost almost every category there are lower-priced models that offer the […]
Competing brand loyalty in mobile devices
http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/11/19/of-101m-iphones-now-in-us-installed-base-62-are-iphone-6-models-with-apple-pay-support A large market where we can consider the effects of networks is technology. Particularly, brand loyalty towards cell phones and operating systems is interesting. If we consider the two main competitors in the field, most would respond that the majority of consumers align with either Apple’s iOS platform or Google’s Android platform. We see […]
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