http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/business/30fund.html?ref=yourmoney
As of now, the news of Bear Stearns has become widespread. With company stock valued at merely $10, Bear employees who had invested one-third of the company stock lost a majority of their personal wealth. Similar to the case of Enron, the collapse of the company also shattered the personal wealth of employees who held […]

Apparently in the United States alone, there are around 20 million stamp collectors — it’s one of the most popular hobbies in the world. It makes sense; the rarest of stamps have sold for amounts on the order of millions of dollars, and less rare stamps can sell for tens of thousands. Clearly, […]

What scares me most about information cascades is our society’s complete reliance on what we hear. Like one of our childhood rumors we let the decisions of others guide us almost blindly and take what is said for granted without a second thought. As I think about some of the products that have recently been […]

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2006-07-28-n49.html
In class we discussed PageRank and the hub-authority computations that allow webpage owners to manipulate their placement in Google search results.  This is useful for most webpages, but what about news sites that want their stories to appear on Google News? Google’s methods for ranking which articles appear on the Google News homepage are different […]

In class we talked about different applications of Information Cascades, one of which was best-selling books. The music industry is a similar application. There is a best-sellers list for music, and being on the best-sellers list obviously helps musicians when they’re selling albums and when radio stations are choosing which songs to play. […]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88030744
With Hillary Clinton refusing to drop out of the race and neither candidate looking likely to score the 2024 delegates needed to ensure the Democratic party’s presidential nomination, its looking more and more likely that the eventual nominee will be decided by a vote of the 794 super-delegates at the party’s August convention in Denver. […]

http://kin.naver.com/detail/detail.php?
d1id=4&dir_id=41401&eid=71p5mUmScjd/oD3X+r/21KICI/GAs/6i&qb=aW5mb3JtYXRpb24gY2FzY2FkZQ==
This link leads to a page that talks about what an information cascade is, and how the Internet is related to the phenomenon.
An information cascade occurs when there so much information that you cannot make a decision just by the signal you get. Instead, you have to look at the signals that others have received […]

Traffic over the internet is becoming more and more congested. When routing one point on the world wide web to another, internet service providers often want to find the shortest path between them in an effort to optimize data transfer rates. However this often results in many signals being routed through the same path and […]

Today we learned in class examples of positive externalities, some examples being: vaccines, fax machines, ebay etc.   But I wanted to focus on cell phones, more precisely how they are considered a positive externality.  For one, people are not going to want to be a part of a plan that is not widely known.  This is […]

Before spring break I attended a presentation for HEI hospitality, a company which buys and sells hotel properties. During the presentation we were addressed by one employee whose job requirements included not simply web design, but web page modification. The purpose of her modifications is to increase the rankings of the web pages […]