Decision ‘cascades’ in social networks
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141222131551.htm
In the article, Decision ‘cascades’ in social networks, co-author Flavio Chierichetti studies how people are influenced by each others decisions in social networks, resulting in a behavior of choices that cause a cascade of decisions. Chierichetti states that to fully understand behavior spreading through the entire network, is that we must “understand how the local properties of individual decisions translate to the global properties of a full cascade”(Chierichetti). Chierichetti then points out that to create this cascade, they are sensitive to the order to which people make the earlier decisions, because then these decisions can be amplified from the effect they could have on the rest of the population. Not only did they find that earlier decisions made an effect on the rest of the population, but the timing of introducing the cascade to the network also made a huge impact on the spread of a cascade. Chierichetti and his team were able to figure out an algorithm that is able to figure out the timing or scheduling problem in cascades and utilize these timing effects as potential strategy for catalyzing a cascade.
This article relates very similar to the topic of information cascades. Similar to how Chierichetti stated how earlier decisions can amplify decisions that people make, we learned through the marble example that which ever the first two people choose, could impact the decisions of the rest of the people down the line. It is also very interesting that Chierichetti and his team were able to make an algorithm to find timing of when a cascade can be used to have a catalyzing effect on the entire network.