http://else.econ.ucl.ac.uk/newweb/research/blurb1.php
The field of behavioral finance gleans much from the idea of information cascades.  In particular, the herding phenomenon has caught the attention of Dr. Antonio Guarino and Marco Cipriani.  In the case of trading stocks, herd behavior is the act of disregarding a trader’s own private information in favor of previous traders’ actions. The results […]

In a paper titled “Do Individuals Recognize Cascade Behavior of Others? An Experimental Study”, authors Tim Grebe, Julia Schmid, and Andreas Stiehler discuss the information cascade phenomenon and how it can affect people’s value of a choice, subsequently leading to information about people’s knowledge or lack thereof of their whereabouts in a cascade. I will […]

In an extremely interesting article in the Washington Post, an experiment was set up to see if commuters in a D.C. subway station would stop and listen to a musical performer. However, this was not any musician; the beggar leaning against the wall with his violin case open in front of him was violinist […]

Two major topics were discussed under the “The World-Wide Web and Information Access” of this course: keyword-based advertising and modelling the effectiveness of network communication through the concept of hubs and authorities. The former discussed the sale of online advertisements, i.e. links on a Google search page, using the familiar second price auction system taught […]

Herd mentality and information cascades seem to be the buzz words nowadays: every major online social forum, from YouTube to Facebook to Digg, has been analyzed as the result of the many following the opinions of the first few. Once enough people decide that something is or isn’t popular, the rest will follow in their […]

http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_5580010?nclick_check=1
It was recently announced that Google signed a television ad sales partnership with Echostar, a satellite-TV company. With their most successful invention of Generalized Second-Price Auctions in web-based advertising, they are looking to use their online selling techniques for selling TV ads.
         There are some capabilities that Google plans to implement into TV advertising. One of which is […]

In most American major leagues, the All-Star game is a long-standing tradition, where the league can showcase the best talent from all of its teams, in the form of a generally meaningless competition. In my favourite league, the NHL, there have been, as of this season, fifty-five All-Star Games, usually pitting players from the NHL’s […]

In class, we’ve started to study network effects and externalities.
In this post, I’m primarily looking to explore two questions. Firstly, how can we better describe network effects in terms of quantifying them? Secondly, what would it look like to filter the first question through a web lens?
It turns out that the process of quantifying the […]

Recently we’ve been talking about information cascades, and lately network effects, mostly in the context of tangible consumer goods and services. A more intangible example of both of these phenomena is going on right now, across the country. Although the first primary is more than eight months away, fund-raising has already started. This article in […]

As pointed out by beefcake [link], finding relevant content often limits users on the internet more than lack of content. Of course, companies like Google have profited greatly from search: utilizing the link structure of the internet to help users navigate. Indeed, web growth these days is very much dependent on the aggregation, […]