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Game Theory and Risk Assessment

In Networks, we’ve been using more and more statistics and probability to answer questions of decision making. In many examples, we’ve looked at two-player games: these have a payoff matrix that correspond to each player’s strategies. It’s typically assumed that both players are rational, and that they would prefer higher payoffs to lower payoffs. These […]

Inorganic Search Results and Information Cascades

Amazon Changed Search Algorithm in Ways That Boost Its Own Products This article talks about how Amazon allegedly implements an algorithm that favors its own products over those of third-party sellers. The key to this problem is that Amazon is both operating the platform and selling goods. Amazon was also accused of implementing an algorithm […]

Searching for Intent – Bing’s SPTAG algorithm

Nguyen, George. “Microsoft Goes Open Source with One of Its Bing Algorithms.” Search Engine Land, 16 May 2019, https://searchengineland.com/microsoft-goes-open-source-with-one-of-its-bing-algorithms-317114 In class, we’ve discussed search engines a good amount, especially as it relates to ranking different results based on factors such as keywords. As would be expected, when discussing search engines, we often referred to Google as […]

The rise and fall of AuthorRank

https://searchengineland.com/goodbye-google-authorship-201975 In class we discusses multiple ways of ranking search results such as in-link voting, and the more effective page rank system. This PageRank system while good is not the best for all markets. One of the marginal groups are authors. While it seems like the internet would be a great place for author’s to […]

How does Google create their Page Rankings?

When most of a company’s revenue is generated online- a trend developing across many companies in todays society- it is essential for the firm to maximize the Page Ranking that it receives on big search engines like google. A page rank is hugely important to companies like this since it plays a large role in […]

Utilizing Network Graphs to Prevent Ecological Collapse

https://e360.yale.edu/features/network_theory_a_key_to_unraveling_how_nature_works The graphs depicting the myriad ecological intraspecific relationships, behaviors, and food webs are just as complex (and confusing) as the ecosystems they represent. As a result, ecologists have been pioneers in simplifying originally complex ideas into simple visualizations. For example, a food web is a relatively easy to understand representation of the nitrogen cycle […]

Bid Shading

https://www.adweek.com/programmatic/bid-shading-is-covering-for-inefficient-programmatic-algorithms/ In the marketing industry, programmatic advertising has become the norm. More recently, the industry has seen a shift to first-price auctions from second-price auctions where winners pay the amount that they bid rather than the amount of the second highest bidder. This shift has caused marketers to experience a sudden increase in costs, causing […]

PageRank’s Alternative Applications

In the first article, PageRank is demonstrated to be not only an algorithm for searching, but also a method to create general recommendation systems. Since PageRank is used to rank nodes in a graph based upon network measures, it is logical to wonder what other applications it has in the real world. Often times, when […]

Baye’s Rule for Population Neuroscience

Analyzing Brain Circuits in Population Neuroscience: A case to be a Bayesian (https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.02527) In class, we considered a simple herding experiment in which a group of students chose a marble from a bag one at a time, and then guessed out loud whether the bag was majority red or majority blue. Based on intuition, we […]

Stepping on Giants’ Toes: Google’s Conflict of Interest in Advertising

One of the largest contributors to Google’s success has been its ability to auction off ad slots for related products at the top of search result pages. This has allowed Google to rake in billions of dollars over the past decade and pushed it to the forefront of search engine technology and big data analytics. […]

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