A Flower or a Mansion? Status Symbols and Market Bubbles Explained by Dutch Auctions.
According to this article from Investopedia, during the 17th century, tulip bulbs were selling at a price roughly equal to mansions in Amsterdam. Having tulips in one’s garden was a sign of wealth and good taste. The phenomenon started due to the flower’s scarcity in Europe, but as Holland’s elite began buying tulips to display […]
How Facebook ad auction works and how it is different from Google’s
A standard way for websites to sell their advertising slots is through auctions. What Facebook uses is the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves auction (VCG), and it was built by Facebook’s chief economist John Hegeman. In theory, VCG does not allow the advertisers to game for their monetary gain, and ideally, it will only show ads that people want […]
Looking at a Network: From the Inside Out
Examining networks is obviously the whole point of this class but a side effect of this is we have to have the entire graph to draw conclusions and do the types of analysis the homework and tests require. However, when the entire network is unavailable to be viewed the only option left is to look […]
Information Cascades and Blackout Tuesday (#BLM)
We have recently learned about Information Cascades and how people base their own decisions upon the decisions of others. Information cascades is defined as someone who observes a behavior of others and based on others behavior repeats that same behavior. For example, if we are choosing a class and a majority of the people enroll […]
Self-fulfilling rankings
In this paper by Espeland and Sauder, self-fulfilling rankings are discussed in the context of “reactivity–the idea that people change their behavior in reaction to being evaluated, observed, or measured”. They discuss law school rankings until the late 1980s were prepared “for and used by academics and administrators”. Then USN started ranking colleges in 1983 […]
Herding Experiment: The Effects on Marketing
Today, we learned about the herding experiment: the phenomena where an individual follows the actions of the group. Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz had run the “The Street Corner Experiment.” They had one person stand on the corner and look up at the sky. As they increased the amount of people that would […]
What’s the relationship between the Braess Paradox and the longevity of our health?
In the class, we have discussed an observation made by Dietrich Braess, which is more formally known as the Braess’s Paradox. Braess states that as the name of the observation suggests, adding one or more roads to a road network can slow down overall traffic flow through it. For me, as I’m sure with many […]