Link to Article
Many people have wondered why prominent sports starts earn ridiculous salaries at one point or another. The process of determining sports stars’ salaries is a classical example of the prisoner’s dilemma. The article presents the excellent point that very few athletes have marketable skills that would enable them to earn a large salary […]

http://www2.owen.vanderbilt.edu/Mike.Shor/courses/game-theory/docs/lecture05/MixedSoccer.html
We studied game theory, Nash equilibria, and mixed strategy equilibria back in Chapter 5. However, I am late on this post because of a permission issue. Mixed strategy equilibrium is a variant of game theory in which at least one of the players exhibits a random strategy. This is contrary to pure strategy equilibrium, when […]

The following article explains how bbm is still an untapped social network:  http://www.marketing.fm/2009/04/29/blackberry-social-network-bbm/There is a very basic, and very useful, network that is created by a simple and popular technology: the BlackBerry. BlackBerry users are connected to each other by the BlackBerry Message, or BBM, service. Only BlackBerry users can be members of this network, and it acts similarly […]

The current situation we find ourselves in with the swine flu brings up similar problems that are directly related to the branching process model of an epidemic. WHO has already predicted of the imminence of an epidemic by rating the swine flu as a level 5, which is the second highest level […]

In class we discussed network goods and how they do not follow the classic supply and demand model taught to us in beginner economics. Rather than a decreasing demand curve with respect to number of products, increased sales of a network good imply an expansion in the sales of complementary goods so there […]

            There are two fundamental reasons people are influenced by others. One is that the decisions of others can convey information so someone infers things about what those people may know. A second reason is that the decisions of others can directed benefit someone if they to choose to do the same. Diffusion […]

In Granovetter’s paper on the strength of weak ties he addresses quite directly the applicability to group cohesiveness and policital activism. Without these weak ties, regardless of the early and initial adopters, information does not disseminate throughout the population. It is the weak ties, or more specifically those acting as local bridges, that connect all […]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/swine-flu/5239580/Swine-flu-do-surgical-masks-really-work.html
 
Global concern over the swine flu continues to increase as the death toll slowly rises.  In class, we discussed how disease epidemics relate to networks and the contact network.  Overall, viruses like the swine flu have the potential to spread rapidly across the network, because of how connected an individual is to the […]

http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/m/articles/search-engine-optimization/google-sandbox-trustrank.php
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html
http://www.joe-whyte.com/2007/02/03/google-filters-how-to-get-around-them-and-exploit-their-loop-holes
http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html
Google’s Filters
Through our discussions of Information Networks and the World-Wide Web, we’ve encountered the ways the Internet is connected and how it is structured: like how it is the “bow-tie” structure of the web. We also ventured in the topics of how the web search works and the algorithm behind it. It […]

Current economic theory is largely based on the assumption that decision makers are rational and well informed.  However, this ignores the facts that information is largely imperfect and asymmetrical in the real world and decisions are significantly impacted by emotion and other irrational factors.  Information cascades play a large role in the widespread adoption of […]