In a social network, there is a tendency for two people with a mutual friend to form some sort of link. This is known as triadic closure. The basic principle behind this idea is that new links are likely to form between people with one or more common friends due to a number of factors: […]

The second price (sealed bid) auction runs the same as the first price auction, except the winner pays the second highest bid. Today, eBay is one of the most popular second price auctions (along with Google, Amazon.com, AuctionWatch.com and Yahoo!, etc) in the markets. According to eBay’s second price auction, each buyer specifies their maximum […]

According to this article, the market did not do well yesterday, and the primary reason was that indicators such as falling consumer confidence, housing prices, and inflation in other sectors induced people to stop spending and further injure the economy thus lowering the Dow Jones Industrial Average. This may seem to make perfect sense, […]

In accordance with the topic of the Information Cascade, a recent study was published which analyzed how likely college level students are to click a link from a Google search based on the abstract relevance and its position on the page (see http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue3/pan.html).
The results of the study indicate that college students are influenced both by […]

     Earlier this semester, I enrolled in a course on regional economic development through the architecture school’s Department of City and Regional Planning.  From the onset, our professor challenged us to look at different aspects of economically successful areas to choose a factor or indicator that we believe is most important to creating a successful regional economic development […]

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell discusses a 1999 outbreak of food poisoning in which over one hundred school children became ill after drinking contaminated coca-cola at several schools across Belgium (p. 268-70). Gladwell reveals that upon examination of the culprit coca-cola factory, the contaminants in the CO2 (which gave off a detectable odor, similar to […]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/technology/21ivygame.html?em&ex=1206504000&en=f0c1e25feefc393d&ei=5087%0A, the passage here introduces GoCrossCampus, or GXC, a massive multiplayer game built on social networks. GXC is a team-based locally social online sport that revolves around your connections, location and interests. “Any team of people can play, whether it’s rival dorms battling across a college campus, employees competing in an exciting corporate team-building  tournament, […]

In the market of higher education, buyers are students who can buy only one unit of the good, a college education, but we change the rules so that sellers have multiple units of their good. Buyers’ valuations on each seller’s good may be modeled as how much each buyer could and would be willing to […]

I stumbled upon this architecture competition entry titled “Quameleon” by Ayssar Arida Associates:  http://q-news.archsitestudio.com/files/AA_MEIAC_MIMESIS.pdf.  This project allows occupants to design their own temporary public spaces by using light/sound qualities to augment existing spaces.  Occupants may upload new sound files or video files into database or choose from existing uploaded files/qualities.  As a networked system that […]

Though Googling “Cornell” will return - sure enough - www.cornell.edu as the first result, the PageRank algorithm has limitations that may be better overcome by networks that are more akin to social instead of information networks. A Search Engine Watch blog post, Is Twitter the New Google Alternative?, describes how people are increasingly […]