Peer-Pressure and Information Cascades
https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/03/teenagers-friends-and-bad-decisions/ Information cascades are present when, in a certain situation, one person makes a decision based on the observation of others and fails to stand by his/her personal beliefs. As learned in class, there are three necessary aspects for an information cascade to exist. Firstly, we must be aware that people make decisions in a […]
The Genes That Never Go Out of Style
This article begins with The Human Genome Project, a project to guess the number of genes in the human genome and its completion in 2003. In general, there are still debates about the exact number, but it is generally agreed that there are around 19,000-22,000 gene in the human genome. The article discusses how even […]
Spotify and the Long Tail
Spotify has come to dominate the music streaming service ever since its launch 12 years ago. Since then, it has garnered 180 million subscribers and is now worth around 34 billion dollars on the NY Stock Exchange. Spotify has been able to benefit by providing music from artists that were previously exclusive, like Beyoncé, Kanye […]
Instagram and Information Cascades
The popularity of Instagram can be analyzed using the idea of an information cascade with direct-benefit effects. As more people began using Instagram an information cascade started where later people saw early adopters of the app enjoying the platform and subsequently decided to make their own accounts. People could have inferred that Instagram was a […]
Rumor diffusion and information cascades
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146 While I was doing my readings for another class (INFO 2450), I couldn’t help but connect concepts I learned in this class with one of the papers. This assigned paper, titled “The spread of true and false news online”, is a study that analyzed true and false tweets on twitter and how fast […]
Information Cascades and Banking Recruiting
https://www.wsj.com/articles/goldman-jpmorgan-hit-pause-on-intern-recruiting-madness-1540819063 In class and in the textbook, we learn that information cascades influence the decisions we make – both on a daily and long term basis. We are unable to take a step back and evaluate what we believe – getting caught up in the rat race that Cornell is – in an attempt to […]
How to Model Real World Networks
When trying to simulate a network effect on some population it is almost always infeasible to collect the data necessary to construct a network graph for that group. Instead, scientists use network models which generate graphs for a given population based on factors such as the population size or location. The hope is that these […]
Pluralistic Ignorance and Information Cascade
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/01/sex-and-drugs-and-high-school-but-also-social-psychology/384339/ The article discusses how pluralistic ignorance play a part in peer pressure and inappropriate adolescent behaviors. Pluralistic ignorance is a psychological term referring to “the psychological state characterized by the belief that one’s private attitudes and judgments are different from those of others, even though one’s public behavior is identical”. Simply put, for […]
Information Cascades and The Grinch
With holiday season just around the corner, nothing brings together families like a wholesome movie night. The makers of the animated retelling of Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch, took full advantage of this knowledge when releasing their movie on November 9 of this year. Erich Schwartzel ‘s article describes the movie’s immense success on opening weekend, […]
Diffusion of Information in Social Media Networks
This paper addresses the idea of diffusion of information in social media networks. Typical studies would follow an approach of seeing how a specific network can be affected by looking at each node and its effect on other nodes and how this affect may cascade through the network. This paper looks to develop a model […]
« go back — keep looking »