Penny Auctions: Is It Worth it?
With the recent boom in online shopping, sites such as Amazon have made their name by standardizing prices and selling them at an affordable rate compared to retail stores. But what happens if we want to buy items at an even cheaper price? Perhaps the first destination that comes to mind is eBay, a popular auction […]
The Malignant Internet of Things
According to Business Insider, there will be an estimated 34 billion devices connected to the internet by 2020, with 24 billion of these being IoT devices. Paired with exponential growth in cloud computing, the internet of things is revolutionizing manufacturing, transportation, agriculture, and daily home life. However, a dangerous problem accompanies this massive growth in […]
Consumer Review Sites: Are they doomed to faulty review and product combinations?
The emergence of online review sites such as Angie’s List and Yelp has created an abundance of information that is available to consumers. Purchasers of consumer products and services are able to review their experiences about the transaction so that others may develop a more informed decision about their own preferences. The issue with many […]
Google and Social Good
https://www.wired.com/2016/09/googles-clever-plan-stop-aspiring-isis-recruits/ As Google’s PageRank algorithm serves the utilitarian purpose we all know it for, we never think of it as being used purposefully for social good, but the above article from Wired discusses Google’s plans to do just that. Google’s plan involves placing links to anti-ISIS advertisements alongside results for keywords/phrases that Google has determined […]
Does the rapid growth of Internet promote the growth of Ad business as a whole?
The answer is no – according to this Bloomberg article, despite the rapid growth of Internet and Internet-related advertising, the percentage of ad industry as a whole in GDP has stayed rather flat since around 1950 while other industries have seen large shifts. Its growth basically matches the growth of economy as a whole. This may seem […]
Thinking about the problem of Climate Change
https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2016/apr/13/can-game-theory-help-solve-the-problem-of-climate-change Nowadays, one of the hottest issue is how to solve the problem of Climate Change. I have read an interesting argument about Can Game Theory Help Solve the Problem of Climate Change. The author assumes that “man-made climate change can be cast as an iterated game over a common-pool resource that no one owns […]
FCC Auctioning of Airwaves
Half a century ago, the Federal Communications Commissions gave local TV stations airwaves enabling broadcasters the capabilities to distribute their content to cable subscribers. Now, the FCC is acting as the middlemen as it seeks to translate spectrum from broadcasters to wireless carriers such as Verizon and AT&T. This presents a great opportunity on both […]
How Effective is Internet Advertising Really?
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/a-dangerous-question-does-internet-advertising-work-at-all/372704/ This article talks about the reality of the effectiveness of Internet advertising. According to a research done by eBay labs, companies like Google exaggerate the effectiveness of advertising. Because in reality, people do not actually click on ads, they just ignore the information marked “ads” at the top of their search results and […]
How to turn off the internet
We recently discussed the bow-tie structure of the web in class – the fact that most web pages are in one of three groups – those with many links to other pages but not many pages linking to them, those that are linked to by many pages but do not link to many pages themselves, […]
Neurological basis for reciprocal fairness in the ultimatum game
Would you give up 3 months of your salary just to spite someone? You might say no. Experiments say yes. This happens when people play the ultimatum game. In its purest form, one person is asked to split a sum of money with another person in any way the first person wishes, no matter how […]
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