Analyzing the Spread of Trends and Social Movements
https://www.mrporter.com/en-us/journal/the-read/how-do-trends-happen/527?setupsession=false Social trends are present in every individual’s daily life, yet it is rarely discussed how these trends start, then spread, and then sometimes even become social norm. For example, the ice bucket challenge was an activity in which an individual would nominate three other people they know to do the challenge, and then […]
Reasons Behind Why People Follow the Crowd
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/after-service/201705/the-science-behind-why-people-follow-the-crowd People often believe that they have control over their own decisions; however, the article reveals the truth behind our behaviors. Social psychology tells us that, because humans are social beings, we are naturally influenced by other’s thoughts and behaviors. One study that psychologist Robert Cialdini conducted was on Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, where […]
Information Cascades, FOMO, and Sold Out Products
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/11/fomo-increase-conversions/ In this magazine article, Scacca describes ways to positively utilize FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) when designing digital applications. Specifically, she discusses sold out products, and why online retailers should display these products on their sites, even thought they are out of stock. There are two big reasons why displaying sold out products leads […]
Applications of Information Cascades to Markets
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/fd94/c12a652da5f8355529f4a372127cfe266218.pdf As is evident intuitively, herd thinking and information cascades are applicable to the stock market and other financial institutions. What causes market volatility is the unpredictability of the threshold, meaning the difficulty in measuring investors trust in the market at a certain time. This dynamic system is rather a system of dependencies where each […]
Here’s some Naïve ML for you guys
https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2017/09/naive-bayes-explained/ https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/naive-bayes-classifiers/ You most probably have heard of a lil’ thing called machine learning – that stuff’s everywhere! Everyone from the technogiants like Apple and Google, to smaller enterprises and banks use it extensively to make great, almost futuristic products and aid them in decision making. Fields like augmented reality, computer vision, artificial intelligence and […]
Google’s use of an Internal Prediction Market
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2284098/google-bets-on-value-of-prediction-markets.html As learnt in class, prediction markets are known to forecast the outcome of elections (more accurately than polls). However, prediction markets can also be used by businesses. As stated in the article, “Google is using an internal prediction market to improve business decisions and learn how employees exchange information”. The system Google uses operates […]