Netflix and Network Effects
https://www.wsj.com/articles/netflix-subscriber-growth-slows-amid-heightened-competition-11603225622# https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/29/21540346/netflix-price-increase-united-states-standard-premium-content-product-features In mid-July 2020, if you were to browse the latest news on the Internet, one of the major headlines you would quickly see is as follows: “Netflix adds a total of approximately twenty-six million new subscribers in the first two quarters.” When COVID-19 first started spreading and state officials began implementing economy lockdowns, […]
Symptoms and Probabilities: Bayes’ Theorem Helps With Hypochondria
Is it just a normal headache, or something far, far, worse, like a ruptured brain aneurysm? Is it just some difficulty breathing, or a sign of secondary drowning? These kinds of questions plague me frequently, drowning me deep within a sea of worry and despair. Yet every time, without fail, my fears never come to […]
Covid tracing apps, and failure of rollout
Networks effects with Covid Contract tracing apps. Contact tracking apps are used to help mitigate the spread of COVID-19. By logging data on who someone is in contact with, they make it easier and quicker to trace who a COVID positive may have come in contact with. Because most COVID apps require both parties of […]
Information Cascades in the spread of Gossip
https://today.uic.edu/study-explores-how-gossip-spreads-in-social-networks Gossip and its spread is something we have all dealt with at some point in our lives. The spread of information about people, typically unconfirmed information, has the potential to lead to many people believing false things about others. In a paper, Brian Flood and Co-author Rinni Bhansali discuss a paper/study from Laura […]
Information Cascades and Herd Behavior in the Stock Market
With it’s dramatic rise in popularity and nature of lowering the barriers and money required to invest in the stock market, Robinhood has revolutionized how people trade. While there are many benefits to providing this opportunity, it also can have negative impacts for some ill-informed traders, who base their decisions on what others are doing. […]
The Boom of Amazon Advertising and Sponsored Search
As a college student away from home in the midst of a pandemic, what’s the cheapest, fastest, and easiest way to get anything you need? Just order it on Amazon! Most people probably think of Amazon as an online superstore for shipping products to your door, but there is a lot more to this e-commerce […]
How the trust and authority factors influence Chinese search engine Baidu’s page and ad rank
In the simple ad placement model VCG introduced in class, advertisers with high value per click will bid on a high price, because of which they can get the best ad slots. However, in the real world, for the Chinese search engine Baidu at least, willing to pay high is not enough for getting a […]
Information cascades and the decline of cooperation in social networks
Sequential decisions within networks, like social media networks, can be modeled in a way that makes them easier to analyze. One important (and interesting) thing that can be found with such an analysis is the occurrence of information cascades. We can think of a chain of sequential decisions (for example, to follow someone or not […]
Why 500 is a magic number on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional networking site now with more than 722+ million users. Its mission is to connect the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. For an average user, the number of connections they have on LinkedIn often has a direct effect on how well they can use LinkedIn to […]
Network Effects in Blockchains and Decentralized Services
As we learned in class, network effects are the beneficial effects that people both add and gain by behaving similarly to other people. A common example of network effects is joining social media – users add their own value by joining the network because they give other users one more person to access on that […]
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