There have been blog posts already relating the idea of informational cascades and the Asch social conformity experiments done in psychology.
This website provides a useful overview of the Asch experiments but the basic concept of the experiment involves an individual having to answer a simple series of questions based on identify a line […]

In “Strangers and Friends: Collaborative Play in World of Warcraft,” Bonnie and Harris discuss the strength of weak ties in the popular video game World of Warcraft.  Bonnie and Harris argue that the game offers many possible ways of brief interaction between players and that this in turn makes the game very enjoyable […]

In class we talked about the bipartite graph auction procedure (BGAP) and how it can be used to find a set of market clearing prices – that is, a set of prices whereby a perfect matching of sellers to buyers exists. As discussed, the resulting preferred-seller graph given by the BGAP is socially optimal - […]

I had heard of the six degrees phenomena before our class. However, one thing that I had never thought about until recently was the potential advantage one could take of such power. Sure, it’s fun to think that I am six people away from people like President Obama, Kevin Bacon, Joe “Six […]

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 […]

(1) http://www.prlog.org/10217335-is-six-degrees-of-separation-the-key-to-the-hidden-job-market.html
The Six Degrees of Separation theory, which suggests that that anyone is connected to anyone else within 6 connections of his or her friends and their friends’ friends, has always been a subject of debate. Many people are skeptical that it is in fact true, but research done at Columbia University in […]

In class we recently revisited the concept of evolutionarily stable strategies and their relation to Nash equilibriums. Now evolutionarily stable strategies and game theory are being integrated into the philosophical field of ethics.
The article I linked to is written by Tim Dean, a philosophy PhD candidate at the University of South Wales. He deals with […]

In class we have been talking about information cascades. We talked about how cascades are easily started and can be based on false information. Professor Easley also talked about how once a cascade begins people tend to ignore the other, private information that they have been given and just continue the cascade. He used the […]

http://www.ausfoodnews.com.au/2009/04/08/half-empty-supermarket-shelves-act-like-consumer-magnets.html
Dr. Erica Van Herpen from Wageningen University in the Netherlands concluded, in a study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, that half-empty supermarket shelves act like ‘consumer magnets’.  Her study, based on experiments involving the sale of wine under controlled conditions, shows that supermarket customers not only choose wine from half-empty shelves more often, […]

           Since the seminal contributions of Akerlof, the pervasive effects of information asymmetry in markets have been studied in numerous contexts. The general idea is as follows: if a market involves sellers and buyers and one party has more or better information than the other, there could be an imbalance of power, resulting in a […]