“Product Liability and Game Theory: One More Trip to the Choice-of Law Well” by Michael Krauss applies many of the issues addressed in class to product liability law. The original article is found in the Brigham Young University Law Review and the link is at the bottom of the page. The article addresses many aspects […]

A USA Today article, On Ebay, it pays to snipe, talks about the strategy of “sniping,” which is described as “waiting for the very last second to submit your bid” for an item. Ebay has a form of auctioning called Second Price auctions. Second price auctions have a dominant strategy for bidders where it is […]

Link: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/aug2007/tc2007085_238273.htm
In class, we discussed online social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook that are used to keep people connected though they may physically be thousands of miles apart. LinkedIn, a professional networking site, serves a similar pupose for job recruiters and those seeking employment. In the linked article above, blogger Jeff Pulver discusses his […]

            In lecture, not too long ago, the topic of balanced networks – namely balanced, triangular networks – was discussed. We defined a balanced network as one containing all three positive links (e.g. a three-person friendship) or one containing two negative links and one positive link (e.g. two friends who mutually dislike another). In class […]

The Office of Population Research at Princeton University explores historic, present and future trends in population growth, decline and control, which in turn has consequences for network structure and interaction, economic viability, social mobility, governmental regulation and environmental capacity. One of the most famous experiments conducted in this field is the Princeton European Fertility […]

In class, we explored the advantages of being embedded in a network. As opposed to a node that lies on the fringes of a network, a node in the center of a network has edges with every node in the network, which allows it to interact with these other nodes directly. The influence of this […]

In our introduction to game theory we learned about the famous Prisoners’ Dilemma, in which two prisoners given the option to confess or not confess their crime, will always both confess, despite the Pareto Efficient outcome of both not confessing. This is because their dominant strategy is to confess as it will always provide […]

Taking the media by storm is news of an online group named Anonymous and its efforts to debilitate the Church of Scientology. For those who haven’t been following the back-and-forth between Anonymous and the CoS, the former is a mysterious “hacker” group which – three weeks ago – posted this YouTube video threatening the […]

I’d like to point out five very exciting articles / links that people should definitely check out:

Finance / Investing: Researchers from Harvard Business School have found that portfolio managers do better when they invest on firms they have personal connections with (went to college / grad school with). In fact returns on ‘connected’ investments were […]

This morning I was having brunch with Paul Hyams, a few guests and some other students, a weekly event at Cornell. At one point during the conversation, Paul made a comment referencing the six degrees of separation, and I couldn’t help but interject in protest.
The 6 degrees of separation concept is probably the most […]