Indeed, examples of information cascade are easily found in our daily lives. But how do you make a cascade effective and reach as many people as you can? We must understand that it is different to start a gossip than to create an information cascade. As professor Kleinberg mentioned in an article, gossip is a […]

The Abilene Paradox describes a situation in which a group makes a collective decision that is contrary to the opinions of every individual in the group. It can be thought of as a self-propagating cascade where each individual agrees to the decision of the group only because they believe everyone else in the group is […]

Reasonably early on in the recent 2008 presidential election, it became clear that (now) President Barack Obama would win, with the majority of electoral votes. The east coast polls had all completed, results were comiong in, and national networks were reporting Obama as the winner. I recall parties erupting in various locations around campus; students […]

As was discussed in my earlier post, Google has a lot on its plate. There I mentioned the way Google works with such a large data set, and now I’d like to talk about the plate itself.
As you may have heard, the internet is big. This makes the index of links and back-links and images […]

Sgroi, D., (2003), “The Right Choice at the Right Time: a Herding Experiment in Endogenous Time”, Experimental Economics, 6(2), 159-180.
In the experiment analyzed in this document the author combines the herding experiment with a waiting option. Much like the experiment discussed in class, there are two urns. One urn contains two red balls and […]

The use of networks and referrals extends into many fields of study beyond economics and the World Wide Web. In this article about marketing, the author writes about the importance of word-of-mouth when it comes to advertising and how positive or negative referrals can influence reputation. Once a referral has been made, the one referred […]

With the economy at its worst since the Great Depression, it’s needless to say that times are tough.  Consumers who once splurged to their hearts’ desires are now cutting back and taking their spending habits more seriously.  According to Jupiter Research, people are becoming increasingly more influenced by online reviews as they shop for bargains.  […]

Recently it has been found that despite the common marketing techniques that attempt to sway public opinion by placing media in the primary influential role, individuals may be influenced more by exposure to each other rather than to the media. According to the theory presented in the article by Watts, a small minority of “opinion […]

In class, we have been discussing the phenomena of information cascades. It occurs when people dismiss and abandon their own private information in favor of what others are doing. One reason for “following the crowd” is because you believe it will benefit you directly and another is because you assume that if […]

The upcoming climate summit in Copenhagen this December will draft a successor agreement to the Kyoto protocol, establishing a new global treaty on emissions targets that will determine the future of the environment.  Although 192 countries will take part in the conference, its ultimate success or failure will depend on whether or not the […]