This academic paper, “Oxytocin Increases Generosity in Humans,” details the study of the effect on material generosity from greater-than-normal doses of a hormone in a small sample of test subjects. The game used during the experiment is a variation of the money-splitting game we considered as part of our exploration of network exchange theory.
In […]

Information cascades occur very often in nature.  One typical example is the case of army ants.  Throughout their history forager ants developed an evolutionary trait whereby, when separated from the group of other forager ants, one ant chooses a random direction and the other “lost” ants simply follow the ant in front of them.   Eventually, […]

The Google search engine has been a great tool for businesses to get their name out to consumers by biddign to have their name as top results from searches.
 However, a new tool by Goolge is angering businesses and have them questioning the monopoly Google is buiding for search engines.  This tool allows people to […]

http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv26n4/v26n4-2.pdf
Given the discussion of information cascades in class and my interest in politics, I came across an article that highlighted the idea of majoritarianism.  In our democratic government, the idea of “majority rules” runs public policy.  So long as this type of ruling continues to exist, information cascades will continue to play a huge role […]

While looking over some of the academic work done on information cascades, I came across a paper by Bikchandani, Hirshleifer, and Welch which seems to have been the basis or an influence on how Prof. Easley taught information cascades to us. The authors discuss High and Low signals, good and bad outcomes (here called […]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/business/02view.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Robert Shiller wrote the article above in the NY Times earlier this month relating information cascades to the housing bubble of real estate investments. Shiller starts by criticizing economic experts and quotes Alan Greenspan as saying that he had “come to realize that we’d never be able to identify irrational exuberance with certainty, much less […]

Information cascades can cause many bubbles in markets. However, it is also the reason as to why popular culture is so difficult to predict. In an article found in the NYT Magazine – “Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?” by Duncan J. Watts – this topic was discussed.
It is a very common occurrence […]

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/villacampa1.html
With its sunny beaches, snow-covered mountains, lush forests, and unique deserts, there’s something for everyone in Azeroth. It wouldn’t be a bad place to visit either . . . that is, if it weren’t inhabited by orcs, elves, demons, undead, and the like. Yes, Azeroth exists in a game–in World of Warcraft to […]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/ptech/03/21/youtube.awards.ap/index.html
This news article is mainly on reporting videos that won awards from YouTube, which allows its users to nominate 6 videos for each of its 12 award categories. These categories are music, sports, comedy, instructional, short film, inspirational, commentary, creative, politics, series, eyewitness and “adorable.” The awards have allowed […]

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 […]