Information Cascades in the Movie Box Office
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165188900000373 In this paper “Quality signals in information cascades and the dynamics of the distribution of motion picture box office revenues” authors Arthur De Vany and Cassey Lee examine Information Cascades in the context of the movies. Movies are a good choice to examine information cascade models, because the authors could look at box office […]
Going Viral and Information Cascades
Why Making Your Video Go Viral Isn’t Always The Answer These article talks about viral videos from a marketing perspective. In the article the author does a good job at describing how a video goes viral. One is the content and length of the video, to see if its worth sharing in the first place. […]
[ Social Media Tech Companies and The Algorithms – Senate Intelligence Hearing on Fake News, Free Speech and Russia]
Facebook, Google and Twitter, the top social media technology companies, figured out that they have entangled in political controversy. According to the news article, they have testified during the Senate Intelligence Hearing on fake news, free speech and Russia. The political analyst, Antone Christianson-Galina, takes a close examination of the algorithms that influence politics through […]
Using Prediction Markets to Forecast the Spread of Infectious Diseases
“Using Prediction Markets to Forecast Trends in Infectious Diseases” by Phillip Polgreen, Forest Nelson, and George Neumann: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9137/6ffb25ec0317ba6c4dec0393cc817b6a496b.pdf In this paper, Polgreen, Nelson, and Neumann discuss the potential of prediction markets to forecast the outbreak and spread of infectious diseases. They focus on the results of an experiment they performed to test the ability […]
Benefits to Following the Crowd
Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/after-service/201705/the-science-behind-why-people-follow-the-crowd Suppose a trend like the fidget spinner or dabbing ends up on your front page of Recommended YouTube Videos. You ask yourself whether you approve of and adopt these trends. Even if you decide at first to not engage in such trends or you are at the tipping point, you would be more willing […]
Social Media: Reverse Network Effects
Network effects explain how the value for a product increases when more people are using this. In class, we have discussed the importance of a large network to help sustain some of the largest social media companies such as Facebook. Although your friends on Facebook are not all strong ties, you stay on Facebook to […]
Sourdough Start(ing) a Cascade
The article: https://www.eater.com/2018/11/19/18099127/bread-silicon-valley-sourdough-tech-bros-tartine-chad-robertson This article delves into baking sourdough’s moment of popularity among “tech bros.” I was initially interested in this article because I love sourdough – it’s probably my favorite type of bread – but am intimidated by the prospect of baking bread despite being a competent baker in other areas. This isn’t really […]
Adoption of Crypto-Currencies in Poorly Managed Economies as a Network
To a non-economist, central banking and taxation may appear as comparatively distant concerns in nations where basic necessities including clean water, food, and medical care have become luxuries. In the face of an awareness of the profound and needless struggles of a population, the knee-jerk reaction is to donate or provide aid. While noble and […]
Applying Evolutionary Game Theory to Medicine
As stated in Chapter 7 of Professor Easely’s book “Networks, Crowds, and Markets,” evolutionary game theory shows that the basic ideas of game theory can even be applied to situations in which no individual is overtly reasoning. While the book mainly describes instances of when evolutionary game theory has been used in the context of […]
Information Cascades and Independent Thought
In class, we discussed how Information cascades play a significant role in our decision making process. We say an information cascade has occurred when, “…people make decisions sequentially, with later people watching the actions of earlier people, and from these actions inferring something about what the earlier people know.” (Benson et Easley: 484) This is […]
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