The Grand Unified Theory on the Economics of Free
Techdirt recently featured an article summing up the economics of goods when scarcity is removed. Specifically, the author recommends that content creators actively encourage dissemination of their content for free. The idea is that unhampered content distribution will allow your market share to expand greatly beyond […]

Color Popularity in Cars
http://www2.dupont.com/Automotive/en_US/news_events/article20061129.html
The above link is an article about DuPont’s 2006 Color Popularity Report, which is the automotive industry’s standard for analyzing and predicting consumer choices in vehicle color. This decade, silver won its spot as the most preferred vehicle color in the world after overtaking green in 2000 and remaining the top consumer […]

A recent article that I came upon in the New York Times that I thought is relevant for our class was about social networking moving to cell phones leaving computers. I think this is rather prevalent in social networks as they become more and more dynamic. As technology changes networking evolves, networks naturally develop into […]

Nowak and Krakauer (1999) apply evolutionary game theory (EGT) to the development of a proto-language: “The evolution of language“.
The necessary components of an evolutionary game theory model (selection, variation, and replication) have linguistic analogs:
Selection: the process of acquiring new linguistic constructs, usually based on the tension between accurate, facile communication on the one hand and […]

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/game-evolutionary/
In this article, found at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the topics of evolutionary game theory are discussed. In addition to the Hawk-Dove game that we learned about in class, they use a model with the prisoner’s dilemma. This game is pat of a dynamic model […]

In the Apr 17, 2007 issue of Fink Again former Editor-in-Chief of The Cornell Daily Sun Erica Fink analyzes the various ways Facebook has been used outside of its definition as an online medium for social interaction. The piece culminates with a look into how Facebook as a social network has turned into a unifying force for college students. In terms of […]

Using social psychology to motivate contributions to online communities
This paper delves into the problem of under-contribution among online communities. The authors conduct several experiments on a community called MovieLens - a movie recommendation community. In an effort to test various hypotheses regarding what factors effect users’ tendencies to participate in such an online community, […]

 http://www.fortcollinsweekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=647&Itemid=35
Colorado Representative John Kefalas is looking to bring new voting methods to his state for the November 2008 election to try and eliminate the problems with the current voting system. Currently, in Colorado, citizens vote for one candidate for each opening position, however it is often the case that no candidate receives more than 50 […]

Going back to the topic of page rank, and the illusive Google search algorithms, did you know that your website could end up in “Googlehell”? Googlehell refers to the supplemental index which has been created to “store” websites that the Google search algorithm deems of “low quality” or websites that seem they are artificially designed […]

The article, What Makes A Winning Social-Networking Site?, summarizes a large panel discussion titled “Social Networking Winners and Losers.”  Representatives from Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites took turns to discuss what makes a social network “successful”.  What they found out was that the definition of success varies from person to person.  Some feel like success is […]