One of the easiest ways to see the trickle down effect was described briefly in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. Malcolm talks of how one fashion trend, the Hush Puppies shoes, were able to come out of near death because of a few trend-setting hipsters. But what does Miranda Priestly, Meryl Streep’s fashion editor […]

http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/reg14n4-inhaber.html
I found this article on the Cato Institute’s website as part of their Regulation magazine. Quoting directly from the About section of their site, “The Cato Institute was founded in 1977 by Edward H. Crane. It is a non-profit public policy research foundation headquartered in Washington, D.C. The Cato Institute seeks to broaden […]

During the height of the Beanie Baby craze in the late 90s, throngs of buyers scooped up the little collectibles, hoping that their purchases might lead to future riches. The manufacturer’s plan to introduce a multitude of new characters to the Beanie Baby lineup led people to feel compelled to purchase as many […]

The article “Amazon Rival Adopts Customer Recommendation Scheme” describes the recent actions of The Nile, an online bookstore similar to Amazon.com.  The site is targeted toward people in Australia and Asia.  The Nile will use software from Avail Intelligence to create customer recommendations, similar to the feature on Amazon.  With this “word-of-mouth” technology, users of […]

             In the article “Hollywood Economics: How extreme uncertainty shapes the film industry,” author Arthur Vany explores how movies are in fact an information cascade.  He claims that movies that have lots of special effects, a big budget, and are filled with well-known big stars will attract more viewers because it is essentially an information […]

We have talked about a few ways to increase Google rankings of an existing page for common queries in class. A “Googlebomb” refers to a prank people attempt to cause someone else’s site to rank high for an obscure or meaningless query. An example of such prank is a search for “miserable failure” on Google […]

As more social networking tools, like Facebook, begin to take over the internet, we are going to see a change in the way advertising works. Facebook has already taken a stab at this and has broken through the boundaries of conventional advertising of click through rates that we have talked about in class. Instead, they […]

Greg Mankiw, an economist at Harvard has posted to his blog, an application of Bayes rule to the 2008 Presidential Election. He finds election probabilities from the website Intrade and defines the necessary variables as follows:
“Let A be the event that a candidate wins the general election, and B be the event that a candidate […]

New data from ComScore Inc. shows that Google’s click-through rate growth has almost slowed to a stop. The rate increase for January was zero when compared to January 2007 and only a 3 percent year over year increase in February. These rate increases are abysmal when compared to prior rate increases only a few months […]

As we discussed in class, there are many things today that are examples of information cascades.  One of the most prominent issues in our image self conscious society is about weight and diet.  This blog post from a columnist  from the New York Times talks about the obsession with low-fat diets and weight-watching. The columnist […]