The road coloring conjecture was proved recently after almost four decades by an Israeli mathematician. The theorem states that given a finite number of roads, it is possible to draw a universal color-coded map that leads to a particular destination regardless of the point of origin. This is equivalent to saying there is a set […]

Viral marketing is an advertising technique that uses social networks to promote brand awareness or sales. The unique point is that the advertisers try to accomplish the goal of spreading their message through self replicating processes, hence the name viral marketing since the idea of self replication is similar to a computer virus. […]

As we learned in class, search engines such as Google harness the widespread demand for keyword-based advertising to generate bucketfuls of revenue. Though we discussed much of the details surrounding the use of generalized second price auctions to match slots with advertisers, we assumed fixed clickthrough rates for slots and therefore did not take into […]

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0731-1214%28199524%2938%3A4%3C519%3ADAENS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O
The above link will direct you to an article by Barry Markovsky from Sociological Perspectives. Markovsky created a model for predicting which nodes have power in Network Exchange Theory experiments. This article discusses his approach to creating “X-Net,” a computer program that simulates outcomes of resource exchanges in networks. His program uses […]

Drugs: Sports’ Prisoner’s Dilemma
The use of performance-enhancing drugs is a major issue in the realm of professional sports. The fact is that drug testing seems to be lagging behind evasion methods. As soon as there is an improvement in drug testing technology, a new undetectable performance-enhancing drug developed and ready for use.
The problem […]

Following up on naota’s post about Google’s algorithms which maximize revenue instead of achieving the optimal social welfare maximization, I will focus on the particular aspect of automatic matching. In late February of 2008, Google informed a group of advertisers that they were selected to participate in the automatic matching beta where Google uses the […]

In today’s world, we rank everything, from college basketball teams to cookies that go well with milk. A simple way of quantifying quality eases us through the maze of decisions in our daily life. But, certain areas prove to be quite difficult to rank simply. One such category is the influence […]

Popular online auction site eBay recently announced an expansion of their SMI (Safeguarding Member ID) system into all of their US-based live auction listings. The SMI system essentially hides bidder screen names from everyone but the seller. At the moment, if one logs onto eBay and looks at the list of bidders for any given […]

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2008/03/18/when_google_does_evil/
(6 Pages - see links at bottom to progress)
This article discusses many of the details of Google’s ad auction service that do not get covered in Econ 204 lecture. Recently, advertisements on Google have been receiving less clicks, which Google claims is an attempt to get rid of “unintentional” clicks and provide higher quality […]

The world’s second most-used search engine, Yahoo, is announcing a move to semantic search. Traditional search engines analyze a web page’s relevance to the search terms by analyzing the quantity of links to and from the web page. However, semantic search attempts to capture the context of data on a web page to understand the […]