Information Cascades in holidays
http://news.sina.com.cn/o/2014-10-08/051930955676.shtml
In China, there is a common phenomenon that people choose to follow others’ decision about plans in holidays. This article by Sina reveals several information cascades phenomena about holidays. It seems that people tend to choose a destination for holidays based on other people’s choices. For example, a lot of people choose to go to popular scenery like Summer Palace, The Great Wall in Beijing. This directly leads to an increase of scenery ticket prices. According to this article, some of the prices of tickets are no longer in the acceptable range for potential visitors. The increasing number of visitors also negatively affects the quality of experience with a specific tourist attraction. Interestingly, there are a much bigger number of people choose to visit nursing home in the National holiday reported by this article. Some of the aged even feel overwhelmed by this unexpected “sweetness”.
As we can see, the two information cascades phenomena mentioned above can be explained by the two effects we learned in INFO 2040. People choose to go where most people go basically because they learn from others’ decision that specific tourist attractions will provide them with more fun and value. This is to say, people make their own decision based on the information gained from others’ choices, which is the definition of informational effect. However, we could see an obvious conflict between the direct-benefit effect and informational effect in those two phenomena. Going to destinations where most others go definitely has a positive informational effect. However, more visitors means more crowded a place will be. Thus the overall experiences in this place will be negatively affected. Plus, people will have to pay more the same scenery because of increasing demand.
Following the crowd may also cause troubles for other people. For example, because there are too many people choose to visit the nursing home where they hardly go at ordinary times, the aged at nursing home start to feel overwhelmed since their feet are washed several times a day. It is better if people could find the balance between the informational effect and direct-benefit effect because doing so will benefit both themselves and others.