Most bloggers of this week also continued writing about information cascade, and it is quite amazing that so many examples can be found in our ordinary lives if we observe them carefully. I would like to mention some postings which described easy to understand real world phenomenon.

Blogger kiisska gave an excellent insight about Stephen J. Dubner’s blogpost Herd Mentality? The Freakonomics of Boarding a Bus and examples of information cascade abundant in everyday situations. kiisska well explained how and why bus riders wait in the long line at the overcrowded bus stop while there is a way to overcome the situation and brought up particularly interesting points “the personal benefit of not being responsible for the losses caused by following the herd,” and “the equilibrium solution to these real life information cascades.”

Blogger sarnzzle mentioned an article from Washington Post which describes an interesting experiment about an internationally acclaimed virtuoso pretending as a street musician and how cascading effect was prevented. Despite the concerns about an inevitable cascade, out of the more than 1,000 people only 1 person recognized him, but her presence attracted more people to come over and watch the final minutes.

Blogger unlash explained the fragility of an information cascade by sharing the observation about The Atkins Diet and how it diminished quickly. Blogger frozenatcornell analyzed Betamax vs VHS and recent Blu-ray vs HD-DVD and raised the point that the understanding network effects such as diffusion of innovations and cascading plays a crucial role.

There are obvious problems caused by information cascade especially on voting systems. As we seen in the websites ranking video clips, early voter can cause information cascade and manipulate the ranking system. A company called CrowdRules’ solution to the information cascade problem for online polls brought up by the blogger stl2006 seemed simple yet very effective. The mechanism is form a crowd, keep all ratings private, compile the results, and release the cumulative ranking. However, the situation might not be that simple in the Movie industry. Three postings each by ajg43, outtatime, and jae37 talk about the motion picture industry and information cascade, and it is worthwhile to read them consecutively.

To mention some non-information-cascade postings, blogger shadow wrote about a paper The Social Structure of Free and Open Source Software Development and summarized the very interesting conclusion Crowston and Howison reached: the level of centrality in the networks is extremely close to being a normal distribution and the centrality and the size of the project is negatively correlated. Blogger portmanteau’s posting was interesting that the blogger brought up a topic of diffusion in networks by looking at the geographic distribution of positive “anymore” and “the car needs washed.” Blogger mrjack brought up the distribution of the wealth of the population - the poorer majority of the population follows the Gibbs/log-normal distribution while the wealthiest follow a power law distribution - and the topic on rich get richer phenomenon. And there were two postings mentioning Bayesian theory and very similar experiments, one by iacrus and one by babaganoush.