“’Q. Why would I want to join an inexplicable mob?
A. Tons of other people are doing it.’”
–Bill Wasik, “My Crowd” Harpers Magazine. Mar 2006, Vol. 312 Issue 1870, p56-66.
A monument both to the potential vacuousness of “information” cascades and the way individuals and other actors learn to coopt the social environment surrounding them, the Flash […]

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 […]

Can rumors bring about the demise of a venerated Wall Street investment bank? According to the Wall Street Journal, the Securities and Exchange Commission is currently looking into whether market rumors contributed to the downfall of Bear Stearns.
“Bear Stearns has been subject to a significant amount rumor and innuendo over the past week,” said Alan […]

PageRank is well known as a highly successful link analysis method for deducing the importance of a web page. While the context in which this method is used has been limited to web page analysis, the algorithm does not make much assumptions about the nature of the nodes. This raises an interesting question. Can we […]

Even though information cascades with and without direct effects have dominated our classroom discussion lately, this entry is going to go back to our discussion of auctions. The article discusses some of the accomplishments of William Vickery (the William Vickery of VCG prices) and how he integrated the concepts of game theory and auctions. […]

An application of information cascading is groupthink.  Cohesive groups promote a series of ideas and socially ostracize those with opposing viewpoints.  Other members lose incentive to hold opposing views as this can lead to embarrassments if they are seen as foolish or against the group in some way.  Irving Janus classifies eight symptoms of groupthink:

  illusions of […]

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 […]

The concept of informational cascades seems to have a large following in academic circles. It is such an attractive idea because it offers a rational explanation for what appears to be irrational “herd-like” behavior. Information cascade theory is used to describe a situation in which an individual makes a decisions based on the actions of […]

Before the break, our classroom discussions focused on information networks and search. The Internet allows access to tons of information, however the underlying structure of that information can play a critical role in improving – or making worse – its own usefulness. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo have enjoyed meteoric rises because of […]