http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/12201.html

The preceeding link is an interesting look at information cascading gone wrong. The presented example is about Magic: The Gathering (a popular trading-card game). MTG is popular enough to receive scrutinous examination from a set of hard-core fans. Some of these fans are renowned enough to encourage followers – i.e. many players will play the same decks as the “pros” constructed at tournaments.

As it turns out, deciding what deck to use is a special case of the accept/reject scenarios we’ve gone over in class. A deck is “good” if there is a high probability of your winning with that deck. The article above examines a specific deck whose value was embarrassingly overestimated for a long time. The deck “Ghost Dad” achieved notable success towards the beginning of its popular use. While there were many reasons to suspect this deck was bad (see above article) it got played over and over again in tournaments. The author of the article explains this as an occurrence of an information cascade.

There was something about the deck that got the cascade started, though. The deck has some “surprise value” that is hard to play against if you haven’t seen its strategy before. Because of this surprise value, the deck was acclaimed as good by many players. So other players started second-guessing their own doubts because, as in all information cascades, the seemingly rational thing to do is to give a lot of priority to the crowd’s opinion (since the crowd is composed of more people than an individual is).

Eventually, though, players caught on to this new strategy. The few players who weren’t swayed by the information cascade played different decks. And now that Ghost Dad’s strategy was no longer a surprise, it was very often defeated by these few players. Eventually, players of the game started noticing this and the illusion of intelligent design was removed. The actual process of this discovery is analyzed more in the article.

All in all, this article is a telling real-world example of some theory we’ve gone over in class.