http://www.healthywealthynwise.com/article.asp?Article=5203
While browsing the internet I came across this article, and the title attracted my attention. Sadly, the article was not about Santa Claus nor the Easter Bunny, but it did analyze and attempt to debunk the six degrees idea. While the article does a good job exposing possible problems with the theory, its claims can […]

Duncan Watts, of Watts-Strogatz model fame, is in the process of conducting a modernized version of Stanley Milgram’s original 1967 “small world” experiment as mentioned in class. Watts, now at Columbia University is the principal investigator on the the Columbia Small World Project. In this version of the experiment, people can volunteer […]

In what may be a politically biased article which bemoans flaws in US military intelligence organizations, Julian Sanchez argues that information cascades are a potential reason these flaws occur. He references an article on information cascades which mentions an experiment performed by economists Angela Hung and Charles Plott:
“Subjects were told that they would be picking […]

AIM as a Proxy in the Small-World Phenomenon
http://aimfight.com/
In class we discussed the small-world phenomenon (six degrees of separation) and how this result is not entirely surprising if exponential growth between steps are taken into account. The site http://aimfight.com/ gives you a score equal to the “sum of […]

www.gmu.edu/departments/law/gmulawreview/issues/12-1/PDF/Pro%20Burtis.pdf
This article is a comment about the use of game theory in practice and its possible applications to litigations.  It spends time discussing the different approaches to using economics in the court room to focus on areas of economic analysis compared to game theory in cases such as antitrust suits. 
It makes a point that […]

Kaushik Basu, in his paper “Teacher Truancy in India – The Role of Culture, Norms and Economic Incentives”, claims that economists often ignore the role of social norms and culture in economic analysis even though social variables, in many cases, play a critical role in determining economic behavior. He discusses the case of India, […]

The article entitled “Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and Six Degrees of Separation” by Ivan Misner can be found at the following site: http://www.healthywealthynwise.com/article.asp?Article=5203
 
In this article, Ivan Misner argues that the notion of “Six Degrees of Separation” in which we are all connected to each other by at most six intermediary links is a […]

Discover magazine recently had an interesting article the connectedness of the blogosphere. Since the web is so dynamic, with new blogs being created almost constantly (about one every 2 seconds) and outdated blogs being deleted/disconnected from the connected component of the blogosphere at a similar (but much slower) rate, it is hard to model […]

We recently focused on simple tipping phenomena. Typically, these models involve a strictly increasing function, where the number of people attending rises with people expected to attend. However, what if, at some point, additional forces cause this function to begin to decrease - congestion costs, for example?
(Much of the mathematics behind this is […]

In this blog the author Scott Sanders discusses how the rapid advancement of new technologies is allowing a new type of collective swarming to occur. In his post Sanders argues that newer communication tools such as blogs, wiki, and mobile phones have allowed individuals to reorder their lives and coordinate actions in a previously […]