Circumnavigating the blogosphere today was an article entitled “How to Ace Your Finals Without Studying”. Naturally, as any student would, I read the article hoping to find some divine secret to enable me to ace tests without studying.
The premise of the article is that it is much more efficient to study in a way […]

An information cascade results from people making decisions based on the decisions made before them. An example of this is when someone chooses the brand name product as opposed to the private label one simply because fewer boxes of the brand name are left on the shelf. The private label brand is cheaper but the […]

Google’s New Frontier: Print Ads from BusinessWeek.com
Last November Google, the renowned profiteer of Internet keyword-based ad search, launched a new advertising initiative for printed ads. In this test project, Google would allow advertisers to bid on ad space from many of the top newspapers in the country, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, […]

http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=57492
From lectures, we learn about the keyword-based advertising that Google and other search engines have. This way of advertising turns out to make $10-$20 billion per year, creating a massive market that companies fight over through an auction called the Generalized Second Price auction. This auction follows the idea of second-price sealed-bid auction for multiple […]

http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-1024234.html
The above url links to a 2003 article from CNET news about Google’s caching feature.  When you query a search item through google, besides being able to click on the main link there is also a link labeled “cached,” which directs the user to a cached version of the website they wish to visit. Google introduced […]

Yahoo Search Marketing, formerly known as Overture, which was originally GoTo.com - the first pay-per-click advertiser, launched a new pay-per-click model February 5th.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/08/technology/08yahoo.html?ex=1304740800&en=658529acc1fc013a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
Yahoo’s new advertising platform, codenamed Panama, takes both quality and bid-price into account when determining ad ranks. This is nothing new - Google is already doing it. Google’s AdWords […]

Testing Vickery’s Revenue Equivalence Theory in Construction Auctions
Vickery, “second-price,” auctions are often used because of their characteristic of producing truthfulness within bidders. The inherent truth telling creates an auction which, in the long run, operates under true valuations, and procures socially optimum prices. However, the idealness Vickery auctions hold seems to sometimes dissolve when […]

Gmail, Google’s e-mail service, has several patents for the use of advertisement alongside e-mails. The use of advertisements based on the content of e-mails received many complaints about violating users privacy. In fact, several of my friends addressed concerns about this feature. I decided to look into this matter to see if there is any […]

New Sony Viral Marketing Ploy Angers Consumers
The Dynamics of Viral Marketing
The idea of viral marketing was touched on earlier in the blog, but recent decisions by Sony Corporation provide a particularly interesting example of how viral marketing sometimes can hurt more than help. The first link is a blog post about Sony’s recent […]

“Game Theorist Describes Unintended Consequences of U.S. Counterterrorism Policies”
Link- http://nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100065&org=SBE
The above article by the National Science Foundation talks about research done in analyzing government strategies when it comes to terrorist incidents. Although dated in mid-2004, it is still worth a read. The particularly interesting part is that the researchers actually use Game Theory […]