Thomas Schelling’s segregation model, discussed in class and in his book Micromotives and Macrobehavior, yields pessimism for those who believe in and strive for integrated neighborhoods. Even a mild preference on the part of all residents for neighbors of the same color (Schelling uses 33%, the example in class used 40%) eventually the neighborhood becomes […]

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/baseball/359350_values17.html
Those who know anything about Major League Baseball can see by looking at the current league franchise values, the rich teams indeed get richer. According to an Associated Press article, the values of MLB teams positively correspond to the revenue collected by them. As evident in the 30-team value rankings, as […]

In March and for months before, the world awoke to a rice crisis. The Associated Press brought the news to us in this article, explaining how many Asian governments are banning the exportation of rice, to help stabilize the costs in their own regions. It didn’t take long for this disaster to hit, albeit to […]

It has been frequently mentioned in class that the spread of disease, technology, or ideas may be modeled by social networks. In addition to those aspects, however, it was found by the National Institute of Health (NIH) that the spread of obesity can also be modeled by social networks, such as the social influence of […]

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/antigold.html
http://hubpages.com/hub/Buy-Gold-for-WoW
First, let’s try to imagine the properties of a market that is most vulnerable to becoming a lemon market.  First, it should be online.  When something is for sale online the buyer has no idea if what they are paying for is what they will receive or if they will even receive anything.  They simply […]

Cornell University prides itself as being a socially and racially diverse campus. Nearly half of all students are of non-Caucasian descent, and there is a rather significant number of each underrepresented minority in attendance. Knowing this, one would expect to see a melting pot of unparalleled proportions when strolling through campus. Cornell […]

In our class, we have discussed a simplistic model to analyze to the diffusion of new technologies through a network of people. Our model operates in the framework of a coordination game, where we consider the payoffs to a pair of adjacent nodes if they adopt either technology. From these payoffs, a threshold value can […]

In class we explored the mechanics of keyword-based advertising. This market came about when advertisers realized that best way for their ad to be seen was not to post their ads for the entire internet population, but rather just to show them to any user that enters a query for which their ad is based […]

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 […]

The stock market is one place where activity is based on cascades. When someone invests in a particular stock, the price goes up and continues to go up because more and more people invest in it. Then someone gets new information and cashes out and others follow. The problem is when this happens […]