In network cascade theory, we see that people are like sheep, ie. they follow the current popular opinion. Whether it be what they eat, what they wear, where they live, what car they drive etc, most people will tend to follow the crowd. In thinking about this, there are two different categories of network cascades that we could think about. The ones where the act of making one choice would have a long term effect, and the one where there would only be a short term effect.

 For example, choosing a restaurant to eat. Perhaps you were told that restaurant B was better than restaurant A, but everyone you saw went into restaurant A. Which one would you choose? Network cascade theory says that we would choose A. But if we are to think about the decision carefully, this is a choice with a short term effect. Perhaps the restaurant you eat at was really good. The next day you’ll have memories of the good food, and perhaps you may go there in the future. Or if the restaurant was bad, you will also just have a memory (but it will be bad) and you probably would try something else. But either way, (unless the food made you sick) the effect of your choice does not have any major ill effect on you should you choose wrong. Thus you may not think twice about following the crowd.

 However, in a decision with a long term effect, such as buying a car, following the crowd may not be such a great thing to do. Suppose you felt that car A was better, but all your friends bought car B. Perhaps car B is the ‘in’ car and car A is just simply “uncool”. But this choice is not a choice that we can easily make. We cannot simply just buy car B because “everyone else is doing it”. We have to think about the costs of buying one car over the other, is one car more fuel efficient, is one brand better than an another, which car is cheaper etc. This means that its not necessary that the network cascade theory would work so well in such situations.

 What prompted this thought was that recently a group of friends started playing World of Warcraft (WoW). It seems Blizzard was quite smart about this, but they provide a free 10 day trial subscription to the game. Thus once one friend started, it was simply quite cheap for another friend to join in, and pretty soon there was a network cascade. This choice made can be categorized as a short term effect, because the trial only lasted for 10 days and the trial was free. There was little cost to the people playing (apart from time) and they were able to follow the crowd and join in.

However after the trial ends, the decision whether to pay for the subscription switches to a long term effect decision. Whilst the subscription fee is not high, the time (possibly) spent playing is rather expensive and thus people would have to think seriously before following their friends in paying for the subscription. Of course, the addictiveness of WoW is probably what tips people over the line to subscribe to the game after the trial, but before subscribing, one would seriously consider the time spent and the money spent if one were to subscribe.