Benefits and Drawbacks of Price Gouging
A Perspective on Price Gouging: An Exploitative Benefit In recent years, our vulnerability to demand and supply shocks has been exposed in a myriad of ways. Supply shocks, characterized by unexpected changes in the supply of a commodity, have most notably been felt during the COVID pandemic, which interrupted production across the globe. In turn, demand […]
Google’s Advertisement Auctions: From Second Price to First Price
In the past year, Google has made the decision to change its ad targeting and selling branch, AdSense and AdExchange, from a second-price auction to a first-price auction. Behind the motivation of this change, Google claimed it was to “help advertisers by simplifying how they buy online ads and make it easier for them to […]
Structural Balance in House of the Dragon
The House of the Dragon is a new television series that is based on the book dance of dragons by George R. Martin. It is a series that focuses on the struggle of certain groups to help their preferred candidate become the next king amid an unclear succession. Each house has the ultimate goal of […]
Application of Game Theory in Cryptocurrencies
In lecture, we learned about how cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have transaction fee payment systems that resemble discriminatory auctions. I’d like to expand on this topic by discussing the application of game theory in cryptocurrencies, specifically Ethereum. Ethereum blockchain is designed as a public, decentralized network of distributed nodes: servers storing the entire history of […]
Understanding Social Networks to Make Better Decisions
The article “Using data from social networks to understand and improve systems” talks about how the social network can influence how well a group functions. By analyzing the interactions and the dynamics of social networks MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) aimed to improve decision-making and make better predictions. The article talked about […]
Game Theory: Sleeping Or Studying the Night Before an Exam
A question that faces students in college far too often is whether, the night before a big exam, one should pull an all-nighter or “give up” and go to bed. While some students may believe that staying up all night to study will allow them to do better on that exam, studies show that doing […]
The Prisoner’s Dilemma in Business and the Economy
This research looks into whether the top management of all legacy U.S. airlines coordinated output reduction (fewer passenger seats) on rival routes by using their quarterly earnings calls as a means of contact with other airlines. Using Natural Language Processing methods from computational linguistics, they create an original and novel dataset on the public communication […]
The Strength of Weak Ties and Homophily in Social Networks
One of the most interesting parts of graph theory that we discussed was the strength of weak ties; the theory analyzed by Mark Granovetter was that “weak ties” or people that one considered acquaintances and not close friends were more likely to give people new information about job openings. This is because weak ties are […]
The Game Theory of the China/Taiwan Conflict
My selected article, [“China blockade would be act of war, Taiwan would not surrender”, Yimou Lee, Taiwan News, 2022.], details Taiwan’s plan to not surrender if China goes to war. Let’s explore why this is using the game theory we have learned in Networks 2040. In recent years, international relations between China and Taiwan have […]
Climate Change as a Collective Action Problem
A recent article by University of Pennsylvania professor Cary Coglianese points out a puzzling fact about inaction on climate change. Despite powerful and overwhelming scientific evidence and a comprehensive toolkit of policy instruments, humanity has in many ways not achieved significant progress on reducing emissions and other environmental harms. Even with current pledges from countries […]
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