Companies advertise everywhere! While there are a select few ads that make people talk, such as the iPod (what is the name of that song?) and Geico commercials, a majority of ads are just plain obnoxious. With all the buzz about social networks, however, advertisers are picking up on new ways to increase their sales.
The […]

Kaushik Basu, in his paper “Teacher Truancy in India – The Role of Culture, Norms and Economic Incentives”, claims that economists often ignore the role of social norms and culture in economic analysis even though social variables, in many cases, play a critical role in determining economic behavior. He discusses the case of India, […]

http://www2004.org/proceedings/docs/1p491.pdf
While searching for a relevant topic to do my last blog on, I came across this paper which couldn’t be any more applicable to class discussion and web blogging. Several researchers from IBM and MIT decided to develop an algorithm to model the dynamics of information diffusion through blogging. In their proposal, […]

http://blog.wired.com/games/2007/04/wii_and_the_tip.html
According to a blogger from Wired, Nintendo used a marketing strategy discussed in Malcom Gladwell’s novel, The Tipping Point. Shortly before the launch of the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo invited gamers to “Ambassador Parties” where gamers brought about twenty of their friends to try out the Wii. As the word “ambassador” may suggest, gamers […]

Michael Lewis has sold many thousands of books in the past four years by utilizing a Malcolm Gladwell-like perspective and writing style in analyzing the sporting world. His 2003 book Moneyball is famous for its examination of baseball’s Oakland A’s; despite having one of the lowest payrolls in all of Major League Baseball, the […]

Globalization and expansion of markets are popular phenomena in the contemporary world. It is important, nowadays, for producers to consider the market potential and the speed of diffusion in international markets but these factors vary greatly across countries. A paper by researchers at the Yale School of Management discusses the cross-national market penetration factors that […]

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/game-theory/#Behav
Although this article is long, I will focus on the section titled, Game Theory and Behavioral Evidence. One of the major criticisms of game theory is that it does not make specific enough predictions and that it does not adequately predict behavior. The assumption that the players be perfectly rational is argued by […]

In the paper The Small World Web by Lada A. Adamic, the author attempts to demonstrate that the largest strongly connected component of the link graph representing the internet satisfies the small world phenomenon. That is, he shows that sites in the largest component are separated by an average of […]

The following article takes a look at how information diffuses throughout blogs: http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/990000/988739/p491-gruhl.pdf?key1=988739&key2=5402837711&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=20792120&CFTOKEN=30091602
There were two levels of analysis involved in this study. First they considered a topical approach: seeing how various world events and even local events affected spread topics throughout blogs. The researchers called this approach the “macroscopic” approach. […]

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/99/9/5766.pdf
Duncan Watts’ 2001 paper “A simple model of global cascades on random networks” analyzes the conditions under which global information cascades occur, using a simple model with varying parameters. A global information cascade is just a cascade that influences most of the nodes in a large network, initially formed by a small number […]