http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2007/04/general-economic-equilibrium-in-world.html
Although the market of each server in World of Warcraft is very large, the market is simplified by allowing direct exchange between players in an auction house. The auction house is a place where players can put items they don’t want up for sale, with a starting bid and buyout price, for other players […]

http://social.cs.uiuc.edu/people/gilbert/papers/chi08-rural-gilbert.pdf
In this research paper of UIUC, it is noticed that rural communities use modern social websites (ie facebook, myspace) in different ways than urban communities.
The social network of rural communities differ from the social network of urban communities . In general, rural communities are known to have more strong ties while urban communities are […]

        In this article, the author describes the entrance of a new competitor into the mobile market.  In particular, in Great Britain, a new company, Hutchison 3G has attempted to break into the ultra-competitive wireless communications industry.  However, as expected, they have had a considerable amount of difficulty persuading customers to leave their […]

New Scientist Tech: Wireless worms will follow influenza’s example
It probably comes as a surprise to many people as to how closely real-life flu is related to its digital counterpart, or rather, the other way round. After all, wireless worms are just mere exploit codes running on devices capable of communicating with other devices. Devices […]

The study of social networks is crucial to understanding economic development in lesser developed countries. Too often, the traditional approach to analyzing demographic behavior - with individuals acting independently with each other - does not fit in with real life trends. Hence, it is necessary to investigate decision making in social networks to fully understand […]

The Cold War held a shaky peace through the use of a strategy known as Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). As a result of the nuclear arms race of the 1950’s and 1960’s, both the United States and the Soviet Union possessed enough thermonuclear weapons and ballistic missiles to instantly theoretically destroy all human life on […]

In class we have talked about the power that comes from occupying certain locations in a network. Nodes with a lot of edges, or well connected nodes, have a lot of power. Furthermore, we have talked about how edges form. They can form randomly but they are more likely to form between […]

In this course we have discussed the importance of a network’s structure, and how a node’s position in that structure helps to determine the balance of power in that network.  This idea is demonstrated very well in the film The Battle of Algiers (1965).  In this film the French army is engaged in a guerilla-warfare […]

We have talked about the prisoner’s dilemma in class but what is also of interest is the effect game theory plays in the “game” played between criminals and the police and the result it has on the unsuspecting public. One of the things Ehud Guttel and Barak Medina discuss in their paper is how criminal […]

More than a year after it’s first available, the Nintendo Wii is still in shortage. Never available in the stores; prices skyrocketed on eBay. Plus many people now use all kinds of online Wii tracking software to try to make money from this unbalanced supply and demand.
The situation was even worse right before Christmas, when […]