I have always been interested in sociopolitical phenomena commonly referred to as “red state, blue state.” The phrase circulates more and more in the coming months of a presidential election, and even more so afterwards. After the somewhat infamous 2004 election in which President Bush (eventually) edged passed Senator Kerry in a Florida recount, […]

Imagine a list of every band. What if there was a way to link the bands based on similarity? Liveplasma.com does just that. The user can enter in his/her favorite band/artist and the site shows a graph of similar bands with the given band in the middle of the graph. Each artist has a bubble, […]

In the world of media, there are three key players: the content creators, the consumers, and the distribution points.  The ‘distribution channel’ is then simply the path from the creators to the consumers.  In recent years, this model has gone through some extensive changes that have produced far reaching effects on the way we do […]

LAST MINUTE BIDDING AND THE RULES FOR ENDING SECOND-PRICE AUCTIONS: THEORY AND EVIDENCE FROM A NATURAL EXPERIMENT ON THE INTERNET
This paper was written by Alvin E. Roth and Axel Ockenfels (of Harvard Economics/Business Administration, respectively). While the latter part of their paper is very technical, the qualitative remarks posed by Roth and Ockenfels shed light […]

Link: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/91/debunk.html?page=0%2C0
During lecture we spent a lot time talking about different types of game theory. But are there really any situations in business that these payoffs really apply to. Not many people deal with two prisoners confessing or a dove and a hawk fighting over food. Sure there is a general way for all the […]

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/flights/2008-02-25-airport-incentives_N.htm
 
Boston’s Logan airport is in a city in which many site-seeing places are available.  However, the city is realizing that it is missing out on a lot of business simply because they do not offer any non-stop flights to Asia, Latin America, Africa, or the Middle-East.  This forces people to take connecting flights, which often […]

In class we discussed the theory of weak ties and strong ties, and the idea that a weak tie bridge is inevitably a powerful social connection because it opens up an entirely new set of resources to an existing strong-tie social network.  This reminded me of the role of public space as the site of encounter […]

www.pipelinepub.com/0207/pdf/Pipelinev3i8Ariticle3.pdf
Above is a link to an article published in Pipeline magazine (http://www.pipelinepub.com/) called “Avoiding Future Schlock: The Real Life Application Of ‘Game Theory’” by Alana Grelyak and Tim Young. It’s a pretty quick read, and the most important thing to know before you get into it is to not get intimidated or give up […]

Looking through the topics that we have covered thus far in lecture I became particularly interested in Game Theory. In my personal opinion, games govern most of our lives, whether directly or indirectly. Since this idea is present during most social interactions I thought it would be interesting to find an article about this topic. […]

http://www.respondentdrivensampling.org/
http://www.migrationinformation.org/USfocus/display.cfm?ID=441
 
Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS) is a technique used by sociologists and other researchers to study hidden populations.  It is especially hard to identify and reach such populations in order to conduct research on them because data assigning people into these demographics is not readily available.  Some examples of hidden populations include second generation immigrants, injection […]