Information Cascades in Squid Games Reality TV!
Hi everyone,
I would like to discuss information cascades and their application to real life. Information Cascade is a phenomenon described in behavioral economics and network theory in which a number of people make the same decision in a sequential fashion. In class, we learned about this concept using marbles. The game marble game consisted of people picking a marble and making a guess about whether they picked out of the majority red or majority blue urn using their knowledge of the marble they picked and the knowledge of other people’s guesses. It is common for people to continue to choose the same guess as other people if at least two or more people say the same thing.
I noticed the appearance of information cascades in squid games reality TV on Netflix. It was crazy to watch! The players add to vote on at least three players to eliminate from the game. All of the voting was public. Each player voted one at a time during the voting device. The players could see the names that were nominated to be eliminated but did not see the amount of votes that each nominated player received. Once a person nominated a new name to vote on the screen. Many players just voted for that nominated person rather than nominating a new person. It is easier to follow the crowd than put up a new name on the screen and have everyone see that they put up that name. People do not want to put up a new name because they could potentially make new enemies.
Back to my point about the information cascade. The players voted the same as other players before them and made the same decision about eliminating. The show was super fun to watch, and it was great to see other phenomena about people’s behaviors! I recommend it to everyone! Thanks for reading 🙂
Cat