The brain is one of the most profound networks we can study and implements information cascading in a unique framework. The brain is a network of many neurons that provide one-way signals to each other, similar to the linear model presented in class. Neurons signal other neurons to fire by releasing neurotransmitters at […]

A fairly old article by Andrea Devenow and Ivo Welch written in 1996 still continues to accurately describe the financial world more than 10 years later.
Rational Herding in Financial Economics
The authors describe the success of the Herding and the Efficient Markets Hyporthesis (EMH) by discussing the stock market and the behavior of many investors. […]

Recently we’ve talked about the “wisdom of the crowds” in information cascades. In particular, how two consumers’ decision to choose to go to restaurant A instead of B may cause all subsequent consumers to make the same choice. This scenario embodies this notion that herds of people might make a better choice than a single […]

The Semantic Web has often been hailed as one of the biggest revolutions in networking, the creation of well defined organizational links between media, information and other things between networked media. However, as promised as thei technology has been, it has yet to truely take off. Initially posted in Slashdot, Stephen Downes’s inflamatory post on […]

http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/2007/03/20/is-googles-pay-per-action-a-threat-to-affiliate-networks
In a post by Andy Beal, entitled “Is Google’s Pay-Per-Action a Threat to Affiliate Networks?” Beal raises the notion that the emergence of Google’s new Pay-Per-Action product might come off as a challenge to any of the affiliate marketing networks. As mentioned in previous blog posts, with Pay-Per-Action (PPA), instead of paying per click […]

The topic of this research paper (Princeton University) is information cascades. The concepts are the same as many of the principles that we have gone over in class, however they are developed much further to explain phenomena observed in real situations. The experiments involve a simple scenario, with many decision makes, two choices, […]

The sudden and widespread attention given to the “Vote Different” video clip (also sometimes referred to as “Obama 1984″ or “Hillary 1984″ ) is a dramatic example of the sort of tipping phenomenon that the course is beginning to cover. On YouTube, the commercial has now been viewed almost 3 million times, which doesn’t […]

In this article, http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/005507.html, Ethan Zuckerman offers bloggers an overview and a review of Cass Sunstein’s book, Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge.  The review is fairly long and covers a large amount of information and Sunstein’s argument about how today’s society aggregates information—for better of worse.  While I cannot cover all of Sunstein’s points, […]

Blogs to Riches
http://nymag.com/news/media/15967/ 
(This article contains a few instances of language that some may find objectionable.)

This article looks at the growth of blogging as a source of income through advertising, and examines the factors that lead to the differential success (in terms of advertising revenue generated) of blogs.  Blogging as a ‘job’ has very few barriers to […]

In the 1960’s Stanley Milgram performed an experiment where subject individuals were given a letter and asked to send this letter to an individual unknown to the subject through a chain of personal acquaintances. The result, that these letters flowed a chain of weak personal acquaintances, was used by Mark Granovetter in “The Strength of […]