Cornell Vietnamese Pho Night and Information Cascade through the Social Media
Brian Chen
NetID: bc596
Article: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437115008729
Social Media has led to a lot of information cascade especially to the attendance of people in formal events. Information cascading occurs when someone else observes a behavior and then repeats the same behavior because he/she is right. It usually starts with a small group and then balloons to a larger group due to more and more people observing the same behavior. This theory can be applied to the attendance of people in formal events. Back in the olden days, people would have to be send paper invitations to everyone and sometimes people get lazy and don’t invite as large of a group as they could have. However, technology has made it possible to invite as many people as you want with one click of a button. When people are all invited to the same event on the same event page, they are automatically connected to a network. Once they are connected to the same network, it is possible for their behavior to be influenced by others.
The CVA or Cornell Vietnamese Association recently held a Cornell Vietnamese Pho Night. They invited people to this event through a Facebook page and apparently this event turned out to be very popular as they sold out of tickets the night before the Pho night was to occur.
Information Cascading could have had a big part into why the event was to be sold out. When people see the event page, they also see who has attended to and who will not be attending. If people view the page and see a lot of people will be attending, they will also be compelled to attend the event. Contrary, if people view the page and see that a lot of people are not interested in attending the event, they will compelled to not attend the event. As the case was with CVA Pho Night, participants were compelled to participate as they saw that all their friends were going to go.
