Every community, every social network of reasonable size has clusters. While not strictly inevitable, it’s pretty certain that such denser pockets will arise given the chance just given the way people tend to make connections and networks tend to form even if there are no environmental conditions encouraging them. Given such factors however, such clustering […]

GotGame
GotGame is an up and coming social platform for gamers that is being developed with hopes of connecting gamers to each other–basically, it can be described as Facebook meets AIM for gamers. Now, because there is currently no other service like this in existence, the rate at which GotGame will diffuse amongst gamers […]

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/television/news/e3ie6b027a8a8962cf1b6c67db6f86cab51
Most Americans, and even many foreigners are very aware of large media networks such as the MTV network. The network covers media on the most popular fronts with exclusive gossip, addictive programs and let’s not forget the frequent appearances of those famous guests. And all this is easily accessible by TV or internet. With a […]

An interesting political problem that has been heavily discussed lately is the brain drain problem.  It is possible, however, to look at this from a game theory perspective.  Suppose that there are two types of workers in a developing country:  high and low productivity workers.  Now, suppose that both travel to a developed country to […]

        These days, the major news in technology/media industry has been possible acquisition of Yahoo! by Microsoft Co.  It seemed like these two business moguls were very close to merging together as Microsoft pursued actively after Yahoo!  However, the Board of Directors of Yahoo did not accept Microsoft’s bid and the acquisition did not […]

According to the lemon laws recently discussed in class, asymmetrical information can create a market where the quality of the good becomes uncertain. In lecture we discussed this effect in the used car market. The seller has an advantage to offer low-quality car (lemon) to the less-informed buyer so only the average quality […]

A recent article in Popular Mechanics theorizes that the current model for a search engine could quickly become obsolete. Current search engines use a variety of techniques to decide which web pages are the most relevant to the keywords designated by the user. This works well today because the search engine ultimately decides this relevance […]

Many of you may be familiar with the story of The Emperor’s New Clothes, or some adaptation of it. Different versions of the tale exist in a number of different cultures, but they are all similar in their plot and moral.
The plot summary is as follows: two “swindlers” appear at a kingdom, […]

As you probably all know, Wikipedia is the largest free-content encyclopedia on the Internet written by hundreds and thousands of contributors. In the beginning of March 2008, official article count for all Wikipedias reached 10 million.
What we are not always aware of when we are searching for Wikipedia articles to […]

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-doping-dilemma
The Scientific American article “The Doping Dilemma” written by Michael Shermer tells how game theory helps to explain the pervasive abuse of drugs in cycling, as well as baseball and other sports. As we have studied, game theory is the study of how players choose strategies in order to maximize their payoffs by anticipating […]