Can Information Cascades Lead to Financial Bubbles?
After the financial crisis of 2008, many people were asking the same question: how did experts not identify the bubble forming in the housing market? In hindsight, it is easy to see how irrational investors were in ignoring the risks they were taking on in the marketplace. However, it is difficult to explain why such […]
Fear Enhances the Misinformation Cascade
In 2014 when the first case of Ebola was diagnosed in the United States, a misinformation cascade rapidly started. People were spreading false information faster than the Department of Public Health was able to dispel the false information. Technology has made this misinformation cascade spread faster than ever before. Before technology, this information cascade had […]
Social Contagion
A research article titled “Infectious Disease Modeling of Social Contagion in Networks” uses the epidemic modeling we discussed in class to analyze obesity with a few interesting caveats. One difference between obesity and typical epidemics (infectious diseases) is that obesity is a behavioral phenomenon that can be transmitted by non-social mechanism in additional to social […]
Herd Mentality for the Holidays
The Winter Holiday season is fast approaching. During this shopping season, consumers are looking for the best prices for their loved ones. With this influx of consumers, businesses and retailers are keen to increase their profits to yearly highs, in order to minimize losses or maximize gains. Yet, the shopping environment has changed immensely. Specifically, […]
Using Social Networks to Gather Information
In 2009, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, created a challenge where they deployed 10 red weather balloons across the country, and teams competed to discover the locations of all the balloons. The grand prize was $40,000. The idea behind the challenge was to be able to take in massive amounts of information, and be […]
Social Media Misinformation Cascades
Source: Paris Attacks Give Rise to Fakes and Misinformation This article talks about how recently, and numerous times in the past, rumors went viral on social media pages, even though these rumors were not true. The most recent incident of this is many rumors that spread after the terrorist attacks in Paris. One example is […]
Using Clusters to Increase Market Share using Videogames as an Example
It’s no doubt that there are millions of people interested in gaming out there, and it’s no doubt that huge corporations like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are trying to tap into that market with their various products like the Xbox One, PS4, and WiiU (respectively). As we all know, these companies are constantly advertising their products, […]
Information cascades and mob mentality
http://source.southuniversity.edu/examining-the-mob-mentality-31395.aspx This article talks about mob mentality and includes parts of an interview with Tamara Avant, a psychology program director at South University. She talks about mob mentality and why it occurs. A large point that she makes is that a group seems to make some behaviors acceptable that would not be acceptable otherwise. These […]
X-Only Tic Tac Toe
Traditional Tic Tac Toe is pretty boring when both players know how to play. The strategy of the game is extremely simple, to the point a game between two reasonably good players always ends in a draw. In this video by Numberphile, Thane Plambeck explains a Tic Tac Toe variant that alleviates this problem, and […]
Social Media– What we want to feel and be
Facebook, Twitter, and similar social media platforms have become the internet’s homepages for all sorts of news, whether that news is about gossip or is about international relations, by tailoring News Feeds to a user’s perceived interests. These platforms will prioritize articles and videos by utilizing complex machine learning algorithms to study the friends, organizations, […]
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