Archive for the 'Education' Category

Information Cascades: Real Estate Bubble in South Korea

articles : http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/132511164.html
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1828706/posts
According to the article, at the end of 2001, the price of real estate, especially that of apartment, has been skyrocketed in some metropolitan area of Seoul, South Korea. That area is called Gangnam district where many private institutes gathered. […]

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Information Cascade

In class, we discussed information cascade in terms of economic behavior of the mass. An information cascade is a situation in which every subsequent actor, based on the observations of others, makes the same choice independent of his/her private signal. This may result in erroneous mass behavior. Information cascade is similar to […]

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Coase Theorem: a foundation to deal with negative externalities

We’re starting to cover in class the topic of network effects, where goods consumed have positive externalities (e.g. the more people have cellphones, the more utility the people buying them will enjoy). Of course, negative externalities exist as well: imagine a river, a factory upstream and a farm downstream. In this case, the water of […]

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Quality clicks: Making more with less

As a company built on search, it comes as no surprise that Google is heavily dependent on keyword-based advertising. A large chunk of Google’s revenue is generated from clicks on its search ads. Recently, a report from researcher comScore showed that Google’s search-related ads are experiencing a decline in the number of clicks. The research […]

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Do individuals recognize cascade behavior of others?

A very interesting question was asked in a previous lecture about whether or not people can see past choices. According to the results of an experimental study based on the Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer and Welch (BHW) model, many individuals do not in fact recognize cascade behaviors of others. The BHW model shows that in decisive situations […]

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Be Your Own Critic

 
Robert Shiller recently made an application about the incompleteness of information cascades and its dangerous attributes to the recent housing bubble. But what if the information that cascades is more opinionated than informational? An example of this is the critic industry. How many of us have seen a movie or eaten at a restaurant at […]

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Information Cascades and the Housing Bubble

http://www.ohio.com/editorial/commentary/16246947.html?page=1&c=y
The Akron Beacon Journal discusses the recent housing bubble and the failure of economic experts to recognize the problem. They quote Alan Greenspan’s autobiography, saying, “I’d come to realize that we’d never be able to identify irrational exuberance with certainty, much less act on it, until after the fact”. The article introduces the […]

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Advertising, decent business?

According to class material, Web search was initially supposed to only help users find relevant and useful pages. However, due to the exponential growth of the Web, it is impossible to prevent search engines from turning into profitable money-making machines. For search sites like Google, this industry makes up most of its revenue.
To increase effectiveness, […]

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Information Cascade and the Housing Bubble

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/business/02view.html?_r=1&oref=slogin This article is about some of the reasons the experts did not detect the housing bubble before it happened.  Much of what happened was because many of the top experts, including Alan Greenspan, thought the housing bubble was not going to be a bubble, but a ”froth”.  This is a term used by Greenspan to […]

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Microsoft Blews

Microsoft has an interesting project that they are presenting at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, which is occurring right now (Microsoft’s project will be presented this Wednesday). Blews is a project that hopes to show what the political blogosphere tells us about news. Its goal is to move a step beyond typical […]

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