Information Cascades and GameStop
In the beginning of 2021, there was a sudden frenzy of people buying GameStop shares, throwing the stock market in a state of confusion. The Reddit community r/WallStreetBets was primarily responsible for this ‘short squeeze’ and caused rapidly increasing prices in the GameStop stock, going from $20 on January 12 to $347 on January 27. […]
Batched Market Matching
In class we learned about matching markets and how they are typically split up into “buyers” and “sellers”. We learned about constricted sets and how sometimes not everyone can get what they want. This made me think about ridesharing apps such as Uber and Lyft. Millions of people all around the world use these apps […]
Rooting United States’ Congressional Politics as Models of Game Theory
On October 18, 2021, the United States Senate voted to raise the debt ceiling to just below $29 trillion. The debt ceiling was first instituted in the United States in 1917 with the passing of the Liberty Bond Act. This legislation allowed the government to spend money in a less restrictive manner. But in recent […]
Fluid Dynamics and Braess’s Paradox
Braess’s Paradox is the phenomena whereby adding more throughput capacity to a network can actually result in a worse (i.e., less socially advantageous) Nash equilibrium solution. In class, we considered the application of Braess’s Paradox to traffic networks and noted how the addition of roads could actually increase travel time. However, the application of Braess’s […]
Advertisements on Youtube
There are various types of advertisements that run on Youtube that have their own unique allocation of ad slots and timestamps that cater to each and every viewer. “Trueview in-stream ads” are best known as the advertisements that play before the youtube video plays. In most cases, the ads are skippable after 5 seconds of […]
Predicting Information Cascades in Social Media
An information cascade is, in essence, the tendency of people to make the same decisions as the people they see around them, in a sequential fashion. Most social media websites today allow for content to be shared and re-shared with the click of a single button: Twitter has retweets, Facebook has the share button, and […]
Auctions behind Airlines overselling seats
With the finals schedule out, I have been searching for plane tickets back home. There are various routes available – direct flight from New York, transfer from within the states, or transfer in another country. And this could be related to matching markets which we learned in class. On the left, we have the various […]