We often assume that having many choices is a good thing, and this has been reflected in several settings we have looked at in class: if you are selling your house or auctioning an item, you do better if you have many potential buyers than if you have few; if you are negotiating on how […]

“Managing the strengths of ties for internationalization: lessons from four rapidly internationalized Chinese SMEs”, September 2006, Journal of Asia Business Studies
http://wf2dnvr3.webfeat.org:80/
This article examines the internationalization efforts of SMEs (”small and medium enterprises”, or small businesses) in China. Previous research in this field has focused only on the internationalization of large businesses, viewing SMEs as […]

There have been many discussions in INFO204 lectures related to measuring the relative connectedness of individuals in a social network. Most of these have been in an employment context; e.g., the increased importance of a person who connects two different workgroups together, or the fragmentation of a group due to the presence of two […]

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21264673-7582,00.html 
 In the upcoming weeks, The Australian Communication and Media Authority must decide how to auction the spectra for two new television channels (we call them A and B). The two methods being considered are an open outcry ascending auction and a sealed-bid auction. In the past, similar auctions (for FM radio licenses, for example) have […]

Flight Patterns
(Video requires QuickTime)
Last year, a three-minute video depicting air traffic patterns in the U.S. garnered quite a bit of attention across the internet. It was created by Aaron Koblin (who also gives credit to Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne), using actual FAA data, thus resulting in a visualization of flight paths into, out […]

http://www.cmu.edu/joss/content/articles/volume2/Bonacich.html
This article was taken from the Journal of Social Structure, an online journal on social structure, and provides an in depth look at almost the exact same information that we have been learning about in class. The purpose of the paper is to do look at the various types of social structures and the way […]

Last month, representatives from Palantir Technologies (which is indeed a reference to the Lord of the Rings object of the same name) held an information session at Cornell where they discussed two revolutionary data analysis tools.  One essentially creates networks out of the underlying structure and connections in data, using the methods by which the […]

In lecture we began talking about power in networks and the characteristics of nodes that might lead to power. Dependence, exclusion, satiation, and betweenness were all cited as being typical traits of powerful nodes. The research that identified these traits was based on experiments in which humans bargained over money, with the most powerful nodes […]

The auction abstraction is applicable to many different areas.  One interesting are is in the sports world where the free agency process plays a large role (if the league’s collective bargaining agreement allows for this) in where players end up and how teams perform.  The sellers are the players themselves and the buyers are the […]