Facebook, Reddit, and Information-Based and Direct Benefits
Sources: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-huge-tons-of-fake-accounts–2 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/03/21/its-easy-to-hate-facebook-its-much-tougher-to-quit/?utm_term=.9f017482ea90 In one of the lectures this month, we discussed the differences between information-based and direct benefits of goods/services. Information-based benefits seem to capitalize on the phenomenon of information cascades. If just a few people use a product, others will follow suit just because it seems like those first set of users made […]
Echo Chambers
From Wikipedia: In news media, an echo chamber is a metaphorical description of a situation in which beliefs are amplified or reinforced by communication and repetition inside a closed system. In the world of social media and politics, the “echo chamber “would function as a bubble that filters incoming content and tailors incoming information to […]
US Trade war likely to last a long time
https://www.marketplace.org/2018/10/25/economy/game-theory-suggests-trade-war-could-last-long-time For some time now, the US is said to either be in or near a war with the rest of the world, in terms of trade. One prominent example of this is in the “Sino-American trade war,” where the US has put tariffs on solar panels, steel , aluminum and more from the rest […]
Using Game Theory to Predict Social Conflicts
Game theory’s use of mathematical models to study conflict and cooperation between entities and spans throughout nearly all platforms, industries, and structures of our society. Not only are its uses carried out in the realm of economics and politics, but they have practical applications to a diverse range of fields, including politics and economics. The […]
Information Cascades Resulting From Bias in News Sources
The general population feels that they adequately keep up with the news and current events, but do they really? Most of the information that we take in is not first hand, and thereby can be tweaked and modeled to present us with an opinion. We can consider this the first part of the information cascade, with […]
Modeling the Recent Chicken Pox Outbreak as an Epidemic Network
Article link: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46267038 This week, a school in North Carolina experienced a Chicken Pox outbreak. The school had one of the largest exemptions from vaccines, which explains why the infection was able to spread. We can view this spread, as a result of vaccine exemption, as a network, namely, an “epidemic” from Chapter 21. In this chapter, […]
Information Cascades and “Fake News”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/opinion/sunday/truth-lies-spread-online.html In today’s information filled world it would seem that obtaining the truth would be easier, but in reality, telling truth apart from fiction is harder than it seems. However, as researchers from MIT have concluded, people, unknowingly have contributed to the spread of misinformation. “The top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between […]
How game theory helps predicting spread of disease
In our class, we learned that there are certain ways for us to predict the spread of a disease. For example, we can predict using the branching process to estimate whether a disease will eventually die out, or we can use SIR model to predict more accurately how a disease spreads in a crowd, but both […]
Eating at my Family’s Place using Game Theory
Game theory on eating at a party with an Indian host The applications of Game Theory are omnipresent. In the above article, Presh Talwalkar reasons about eating at an Indian party by using Game Theory. In his humorous article, he explains how in most Indian parties, the host force feeds their guests a lot […]
Network Effects Lead to Unpredictable Disease Outbreaks
https://health.usnews.com/health-care/patient-advice/articles/2018-09-19/hand-foot-and-mouth-disease-is-spreading-again This article is about a recent outbreak of the virus that causes hand, foot, and mouth disease which causes red oozing blisters to appear on one’s body. This outbreak gained national publicity when three MLB pitchers were sidelined with the disease. This disease, which usually only effects children under the age of 5, has […]
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