Game Theory Solution for a Fractured America
Link: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-08/a-game-theory-solution-for-a-fractured-america This article emphasizes how America has become a fractured country, split between politics, race and ideologies. This divide has only hurt the country. No progress has been made on reform for health care and tax bills, and at a fundamental level, there is a lack of trust between Americans on opposing sides. […]
Solomon Asch (1951) and Information Cascades
Solomon Asch’s experiment of 1951 aimed to demonstrate people’s innate tendency to conform to a group’s belief, even if they know that group belief to be incorrect. Asch had participants sit in a group and one-by-one select from a group of lines which was most similar in length to a presented line. The answers were […]
Network analysis and privacy
According to the article linked below, Facebook has been covertly utilizing commonly known network analysis techniques to build “shadow profiles”, profiles filled with data on individuals who have never created a Facebook account, and who may have never even heard of the service. These profiles are created by analysis of a wide range of content, […]
Second-Price Auctioning and Runescape
RuneScape is a fantasy MMORPG developed and published by Jagex, released originally in January 2001. It is a game where players play as their own characters and interact with other players through fighting, questing, and trading. The main economy is funded through a GP currency. More specifically, the Grand Exchange is a market where players […]
Airplane Auctions and a Bidder’s True Value
Recently, several Boeing 747’s appeared to be placed on an auction site called Taobao in China with a minimum offer of approximately $18.5 million (seen on the site as 122 million yuan). Seeing as the way Taobao works is through receiving offers, it would appear that this type of auction would be an ascending auction. […]
Secrets to Google’s PageRank
For several months, JC Penney took the No. 1 spot for many search terms on Google. In fact, even when users searched “Samsonite carry on luggage,” JC Penney would appear on the list above Samsonite.com. This meant that it had an incredibly high PageRank; however, the company achieved this through black-hat services or methods that […]
Game Theory, Manipulation, and Preferential Interaction
MIT researchers wanted to analyze how both manipulation and preferential interaction would affect a social situation, so they set up experiments with “the envelope game.” In this game, there are two players and a closed envelope. Player 1 can decide to either cooperate and share the value of the envelope with Player 2 or to […]
Google’s Search Algorithm Updates, and Their Effects on Your Searches
Google has been assisting people across the globe with their searches for almost 20 years now with their search engine. Google’s search engine was created to take a set of word parameters, and give you a ranked set of search results that (hopefully) will help you find what you are looking for. In order to […]
Why Game Theory can’t be used to predict the winner of Survivor
In class we spoke about the application of game theory in predicting the outcomes of games. A few of the examples we studied included a tennis serve, penalty kicks in soccer, and the prisoner’s dilemma. Even though we can predict the outcomes of these games, not all games can be analyzed using game theory. As […]
Ad or Facebook Post
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/technology/how-facebook-ads-work.html Ever since smart phones have become ubiquitous, social media platforms have turned to this new style of advertising, ads as content. Posts have shown up with the keyword “sponsored,” encouraging users to like a page or visit a webpage or online shop. The ads can be tailored to your previous history, pages that you’ve […]
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