The Long Tail in Customer Service and Relations
In the past several years, there has been a shift in business models from big head to long tail. For instance, we have seen Amazon’s recommendation functionality bring success upon not only itself, but also its users shopping in niche markets. Now, the long tail model is also making its way to communication product companies […]
Social Media’s Effect on Protesting
As we’ve learned in class, Information Cascades occur when people need to make a decision and are able to take others’ decisions into account. The basic principle is that people’s decisions are affected by the decisions of others, because their decisions provide new information to the decider. For example, if a person can’t decide between […]
Popularity, Marketing, Influencers, the Tippping Point, Gladwell, and Watts
Popularity is a provocative topic, and is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a topic of interest to businesses. Especially to businesses’ marketing departments, as they strive to make their company’s products desirable. After all, a popular product is probably a profitable product. According to the More than Branding article, “The Evolution of Marketing” marketing has been around as […]
Information Cascades and Echo Chambers in the 2016 Presidential Election
Many Americans were shocked when the results of this year’s presidential election started to trickle in. Donald Trump won, taking many of the swing states that Hillary was projected to win. How did this happen? Multiple sources indicated that Hillary had around a 75% chance of taking the presidency. Many people pointed to social media media […]
Eliminating Negative Consequences of Cascades in Groups
https://hbr.org/2014/12/making-dumb-groups-smarter In class recently, we have been studying information cascades and various ways of looking at them. No matter what setting, be it a network or sequential decision making process, cascades occur because the participants neglect their own private information about whatever was going on, and would imitate what their predecessors were doing, as this […]
PicturePhone’s Failure and Network Benefits
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25148054.pdf While Skype, Facetime, and other video-phone services may seem like recent inventions, they were in fact all preceded by a much older technology: AT&T’s PicturePhone. The PicturePhone made its debut at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, claiming to be a revolutionary technology that would change the way we communicate forever. Unfortunately, it was […]
Bayes’ Rule and the Law
As we learned in class, Bayes’ Rule is all about calculating probabilities of events, given some that some other events have occurred. This simple formula has far reaching applications in fields such as medicine, sports, gambling, and politics. Many of these topics have been discussed in previous blog posts, or in lecture. In his book […]
Trump’s attention to Game Theory
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/06/17/heres-how-game-theory-helps-explain-donald-trumps-strategies/ This article paints a strong correlation between the strategies of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election and game theory, as we discussed throughout the class. First, the article proves that, in a game where payoff is dependent on both players’ strategies, unpredictability is, in fact, a winning strategy. He used this strategy specifically […]
Comments on information cascade theory
The information cascade theory has three major premises. First, the event being predicted is unknown to all observers; second, the information comes out sequentially; third, the later observers are able to base their predictions on their own signals and previous information. Without these premises, we can hardly describe an information cascade phenomenon sufficiently. In an […]
Apple’s Powerful Usage of Network Effects
A Business Insider article by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry titled “How Strong Are Network Effects, Really?”, states that network effects are often suggested to be the, “the holy grail of online business.” Network effects have the ability to evaluate one’s value of product or service in relation with what others value of that same product or service. […]
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