The King of Oil: How a Powerful Network Position Led Marc Rich to a $2 Billion Profit
Marc Rich, born Marcell David Reich in Antwerp, Belgium, was one of history’s most prolific and most controversial commodities traders. Over the course of his 50-year career, Rich founded and built the company known today as Glencore: the world’s largest publicly traded commodities trader (Value Today), among others. Known for his cutthroat business acumen, Rich […]
The Changing Nature of Sponsored Search
The online advertising industry is currently going through a monumental shift as corporations move to reflect the priorities of their customers. The first example of this is with Apple, which has become more stringent about allowing websites to track the browsing habits of iPhone users. Apple does this via a pop-up window in iPhone apps […]
Network Effects in Real, Complex Markets
This article presents an interesting discussion of the ways that the consumption of certain products rise and fall, with a strong emphasis on network effects. The network effects we studied in class provide a good model of this phenomenon for isolated products; a low market share can lead to a product’s failure as demand drops, […]
How do Gamers Rise Up? The Art of Finding the Games.
Steam is one of the most popular video game distribution platforms by the company, Valve. It can be described as the Netflix of video games. Gamers can easily browse through the tens of thousands of games available for any variety of prices. Steam profits largely on gamers buying a game, therefore they make marketing of […]
Tipping Markets in Digital Age: Pre-Tipping or Post-Tipping Interventions
In class and the textbook, we learn how to find equilibria in a market with network effects. Specifically, the tipping point as equilibrium is unstable but important when firms market a new product. However, it might be more interesting to talk about the factors that determine how strong network effects are in the context of […]
Bayes’ Theorem in Everyday Life
This article about Bayes’ Theorem starts by first describing what Bayes’ Theorem is: the combination of prior and new knowledge to make inferences and discoveries about the world around us. The article also touches on how we use a Bayesian approach in everyday life to solve various problems. We use our prior knowledge to rule […]
The Power Law Applies to the Ocean as Well
This article, titled “Humans Have Broken One of the Natural Power Laws Governing Earth’s Oceans”, looks into how the concept of power laws may also be applied to ocean ecosystems- how different populations of different species’ will change in flux to one another. The article first begins by cementing the concept of power laws as […]
CBS Survivor, in group identity scoring, and a comparison to web search weighted voting
Andrew Hanson’s paper “The Sabermetrics of Survivor – The Role of In-Group Identity to Survival in Reality Television” investigates how the “in-group identity score” of a player relates to their final performance in the game. For those unfamiliar, Survivor is a reality TV show, which places contestants on an island, where they must compete in […]
Antitrust vs. Network Effects
Antitrust laws aim to prevent monopolies that could harm consumers, usually by forcing consumers to pay higher prices due to a lack of competition. They can help keep the economy fair, but they often disrupt popularity trends that can be helpful to suppliers or consumers. One current antitrust suit is attempting to block the merger […]
Information Cascade Trends on Twitter in the COVID-19 Era
Disclaimer: I decided to explore this topic as Professor Easley mentioned it in class and I found it very interesting. It has been almost two years since the first case of COVID-19 was reported in China on November 17, 2019. It halted society forcing billions to quarantine at home and, sadly, causing hundreds of thousands […]
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