Black Friday Cascade
http://clavisinsight.com/news/predictions-black-friday-2016/ Thanksgiving is right around the corner, but to hardcore shoppers that also means that their biggest day of the year is coming up…Black Friday! The term Black Friday indicates the beginning of the holiday shopping season where major retailers open very early (even the day before) and offer promotional sales that attract customers to […]
Why Pollsters Got the 2016 Election Wrong
Link to source: http://www.uniondemocrat.com/opinion/4816894-151/how-herding-blinded-the-pollsters-to-a-trump This opinion piece from the Union Democrat explores how herding blinded the pollsters to a Trump win. In the context of political polling, “herding” is the phenomenon where pollsters publish results that fit the narrative at that point in an election, even if the results of their polling indicated a different […]
Information Cascade-2008 Crisis
Let’s talk more about information cascades. It’s really important to talk about these information cascades because they can cause us to lose a lot of money. For example, going back to the 2008 crisis, the crisis was essentially the result of an information cascade. Everyone trusted the rating agencies because everyone else before them trusted […]
Google will soon ban fake news sites from using its ad network
http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/14/13630722/google-fake-news-advertising-ban-2016-us-election This article discusses Facebook’s ad and news programs and how their algorithms have affected their publicity. The main event noted in the article is the outcry from Republicans over reported censorship of Republican news sources in Facebook’s “trending news” section. This burst of negative publicity paralyzed upper management at Facebook. This combination of […]
Information Cascade in the Markets (Post-Election)
https://theconversation.com/what-we-can-learn-from-markets-reaction-to-a-president-trump-68116 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-08/stocks-higher-with-mexican-peso-as-vote-count-nears-yen-weakens For weeks and days before that fateful day on Nov 8th 2016, the general consensus was that Hillary Clinton was going to be the next President of the United States. The question was not whether she would win the election, but how much was she going to win the election by? When I […]
Unreasonable Doubt
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204002304576628660692030584 Last the Guardian reported that an appeals judge in London threw out a murder conviction since the judge objected to an expert witness’s use of Bayes Theorem. The expert reached the conclusion that it was “somewhat unlikely that the observed correspondence would have been obtained as a result of a mere coincidence.” In […]
Information Cascades: Their Succeeding Affect on the 2016 Election
The United States of America can reasonably be viewed as a large network- all those living within these confines are connected and thus form a dynamic, intricate network. Therefore, it is realistic for ones behaviors or decisions to influence another’s behaviors or decisions. Social pressures systematically aggregate individual behavior and ultimately produce “collective outcomes”. After […]
Why do ants commit suicide?
Army ants are like most ants, but lack permanent nesting sites. They constantly march en masse to look for foods. The ants however, are blind. To follow each other, they leave a pheromone trail that the other ants follow. When it works, ants can lead larger groups back to food. However, there is a chance […]
How to Make Better Decisions with Less Data
In companies, employees often struggle to find a solution to the problem suggested by other employees and their higher-ups. To find a solution to the given task in question, employees look through piles of surveys, reports, and statistics which ultimately leads them to a state called “analysis paralysis”. In this state, people start offering the […]
Information Cascades Among Wildlife
Information cascading occurs not only among the human population, but also with other species, especially those that live and travel in groups. The article I found explains the various ways white-tailed deer communicate, among those being the signature flash of the white tail when the deer is alarmed. Deer usually carry their tails down, only […]
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