Using the Social Media to Advertise and Campaign
With the prolific growth of social media today, it’s hard for companies to ignore it. For Tesla, social media has become their powerful source of advertising. Through the word-of-mouth of many owners, a huge amount of hype was generated, and that was enough to get people excited and interested in Tesla’s cars. At the same time, […]
Early Adopters & Apple Watch
How does adoption of behaviours propagate among social networks? Let’s take, for example Apple’s wearable technology, the Apple Watch. First appearing on the tech scene mid-year 2015, murmurs were to be heard of how likely the watch would catch on with the mass populace. Surprisingly, evidence has shown that people are generally quite satisfied with […]
Information Cascade or Direct Benefit? Peer effects in Financial Decisions
Paper Cited: Bursztyn, L., Ederer, F., Ferman, B., & Yuchtman, N. (2014). Understanding mechanisms underlying peer effects: Evidence from a field experiment on financial decisions. Econometrica, 82(4), 1273-1301. Link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3982/ECTA11991/abstract People often make choices similar to choices made by their friends. I buy this t-shirt because my friend has one, we have “what they […]
Peer-to-Peer Payment Services
In class, we learned about direct and indirect benefits a consumer can receive from using a product. An indirect benefit of following a crowd is based on the premise that a consumer can infer that a product is good quality because everyone else is using the product. In lecture, one example was that a person may decide to […]
Information Cascades in Advertising Methods
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21678216-authenticity-being-peddled-cure-drooping-brands-its-real-thing In class we learned about the concept information cascades, which occurs when a person observes the actions or behaviors of others and follows regardless of their own predispositions or private information. The “cascade” occurs when people sequentially follow the crowd based on the decisions of people made before them. In this article, this […]
Using Bayes Theorem to Classify Incoming Emails
It is often important to reinforce topics learned in the classroom with real world examples. For instance, when taught purely based on theory, the real world importance of Bayes’ Theorem can easily be lost. The ability to calculate conditional probability based on other known probabilities is crucial to several pieces of technology we interact with […]
Apple’s New Search Algorithms and Manipulating App Store Search Results
Sarah Perez, a writer for TechCrunch.com, has written two articles that chronicle the recent changes to the Apple App Store’s search engine and shed light into the possibility of Apple self-promoting apps. On November 13th, in her article, “Apple’s App Store Get A Smarter Search Engine” she describes what has changed in the search engine […]
The Good Judgment Project and Geopolitical Forecasting
Over the last two years, two researchers have conducted an experiment to explore whether or not there is a way to identify individuals with exceptional ability to predict geopolitical events. Together, Barbara Mellers and Michael C. Horowitz created the “Good Judgment Project” an online prediction market consisting of volunteers who had a Bachelor’s degree or […]
Epidemic Disease- MERS
The outbreak of the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) aroused tremendous amount of fear and panic in South Korea last May and June as more and more people contracted the disease, with some infected patients dying as a result of MERS. We can illustrate this epidemic disease as a contact network with a “patient zero” […]
Tech Unicorns and Network Effects
Today’s tech world is all being young, aggressive and cutting-edge. Every year there is a list of top 10 startups to watch, and yet few have made successful transition to the scale-up phase. In this article, the author talks about the difficulty for tech “unicorns”, startups that are worth more than one billion, to scale […]
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