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The Spread of Misinformation within WeChat

Living in a technological dependent day has resulted in various issues regarding the use of technology. Such issues include the spread of misinformation through different social media avenues. Outlets such as Facebook and the increasingly more popular WeChat have all had their fair share with this pressing issue. And although Facebook has been actively attempting […]

Behind EA’s Decision Regarding Star Wars Battlefront II

The game publisher EA has recently released a game called Star Wars Battlefront II. However, the game was plagued with controversy as a result of its in game purchase system. Players could opt to buy desirable characters such as Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader using real money. This content was obtainable without using real money, […]

Tattoos and Cascades

In the past few years, tattoos have quickly taken over pop culture. Nowadays, about 36 percent of young adults between the ages of 18 to 25 in the United States have at least one tattoo. The U.S. News & World Report previously named the industry the sixth fastest-growing retail business in the United States, and […]

Cheating in Online Games: A Social Network Perspective

http://www.cse.usf.edu/dsg/data/publications/papers/cheating_TOI.pdf In this article, researchers study the social networks and behaviors of cheaters vs non-cheaters through the Steam gaming community. Their findings are interesting: firstly, that the positionality of cheating players is not markedly different from non-cheating players (they do not occupy some strange relationship with players in the graph), and secondly, that abundance and […]

2008 Stock Market Cascade

The Stock Market Crash of 2008 can arguably be split into the subprime-mortgage real estate bubble and the subsequent burst and recession afterwards, the latter of which is a classic information cascade in the stock market, albeit a negative one. Pre Great-Recession, lenders would lend to borrowers with bad credit ratings at incredibly low rates, […]

Information Cascades and Viral Songs

Every small musician has the dream of making their song or album go viral. But too often this is confounded with a very vague understanding of what virality really is. To most people, virality is some sort of magic luck that occurs with any song by dumb luck. When I tried to break down the […]

http://time.com/4672540/go-viral-on-internet/ The author of this TIME article goes over the concept of “going viral” and how information spreads online. Specifically, he illustrates how information spreads through Twitter and that information does not tend to cascade from user to user so much as be spread from one source to many recipients all at once. According to […]

Black Friday and Network Effects

Usually, network effects can be described as when people are convinced to adopt new behaviors or technologies based on the people they know who are also using new behaviors or technologies.  However, this can also be used to describe stores and the sales they have. Black Friday is a day full of discounts for customers […]

SoundCloud: Information Cascades and Direct-Benefit of Users

In the age of music streaming, services like Apple Music, Spotify, and SoundCloud have become increasingly popular. Many people would rather pay a consistent rate per month to gain access to a large database of music than buy individual songs and albums. However, SoundCloud offers a service that is slightly different from others: its purpose […]

Social Contagion of Violence

Link Here! In “Yes, mass shootings tend to produce copycats. So do terror attacks,” for The Washington Post, Erica Chenoweth explores some possible explanations for the fact that the number of mass shootings has increased dramatically in recent years. Chenoweth writes that terror attacks and mass shootings are “contagious” in that, “media coverage of mass […]

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