Information Cascades – Honey Bees
Information cascades are very prevalent in human decision making in many situations. For example, when deciding if you should attend a party, your response will be affected by your knowledge of earlier responses. If you know that a lot of people who answered before you are attending the party, it will influence you to attend […]
Facebook and Fake News
This article is a recent example of one of Facebook’s biggest issues: the spread of fake news. The Agricultural Commissioner of Texas recently posted a fake news article about Donald Trump’s decision to remove a federal judge from the “22nd court of criminal appeals”, which does not exist. This individual has 600,000 followers on social […]
Information and Behavior Based Decision Making in High School Elections
Are student government elections just popularity contests? This article discusses high school elections and how students vote in them. Mainly, it addresses the issue of elections being essentially a popularity contest. It begins by getting a general consensus from students on the elections for student government. From this start it seems like students do not […]
THE EVOLUTION OF TRUST
It is a webpage game on Game Theory. In front of you is a machine: if you put a coin in the machine, the other player gets three coins – and vice versa. You both can either choose to COOPERATE (put in coin), or CHEAT (don’t put in coin). It has a Sandbox Mode and […]
Brexit and Voting Outcomes
Our chapter on voting has a significant connection to the British decision to exit the European Union. The British referendum on the European Union was structured as a plurality vote. Britain’s leaders chose to structure the referendum as a single “Yes-No” decision, staying or leaving the European Union. However, in reality, there were 4 options […]
The Spread of HQ Trivia
Source: http://fortune.com/2017/11/22/hq-trivia-app/ HQ Trivia is a new app for the iPhone that allows users to compete against others across the world for money. The app gives a series of 12 questions, presented by a host through live-streamed video, which users answer as the crowd slowly gets narrowed down to the final group. All the […]
Virtual Games
Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/virtual-epidemic-real-life-scenarios/ In this CBS News article, the author discusses how in the online virtual game, World of Warcraft, an accidental virtual plague had led to the death of many virtual characters. This relates to the topic of epidemics that we have studied in class. As discussed in class, the start of this online […]
Speed of Technological Trends
https://hbr.org/2013/11/the-pace-of-technology-adoption-is-speeding-up The 2013 article “The Pace of Technology Adoption is Speeding Up,” by Rita Gunther McGrath, discusses the factors that cause the speed at which technology becomes popular. The article answers the question: is technology spreading at a faster rate now than in the past? The answer is yes. For example, today, the automotive design […]
Popularity Propagation Mechanism — A Case Study on Flickr
Link: http://www2009.eprints.org/73/1/p721.pdf In chapter 18, we treated the popularity as a network phenomenon and had a deep insight into the distribution of pages with different in-links. However, the details of how popularity propagates in the social network aren’t clarified. In this paper, researchers take a further step and analyze the mechanism of popularity propagation in […]
Historical Context for Evolutionary Epidemic Modeling
Paper Referenced: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0040580987900141 In the above paper from 1985, the author formulates a mathematical model to represent the spread of “evolutionary epidemics” which are distinguished from classical epidemics the same way SIRS and the SIR Epidemic Models are distinguished in Chapter 21. The author argues that evolutionary epidemics are able to re-infect previously infected patients (nodes) […]
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