I’ve always wondered how the various coffee shops in Collegetown have determined their prices. Using what we’ve learned in class, can we model the Collegetown coffee “scene” with some auction and game-theoretic tools? And will this model accord with what we are observing in practice?
Setup:
There are four major coffee shops in Collegetown: […]

Websites As Graphs
This site provides a way of visually modeling the HTML tags throughout a website. The nodes are color coded to represent different types of tags - links, images, DIV, line breaks, etc. The model is created via a Java applet, which lets you watch the graph as it’s created. The nodes and edges […]

The big guys in the advertising industry have long been aware of the power of social networks, and have attempted in many different ways to capture the power of face-to-face, word of mouth in order to turn a profit. The general idea is that people will respond more to information coming from those […]

Internet traffic is as succeptible to Braess’ paradox as is vehicle traffic. Kagan Tumer and David H. Wolpert at NASA Ames Research Center present an improvement to greedy internet traffic routing algorithms in their paper “Avoiding Braess’ Paradox through Collective Intelligence”.
We have talked about how imposing rules from outside the system can help improve […]

In class we have addressed the idea of Braess’ Paradox and how it applies to transportation networks–we showed that, in one example, the addition of a new road will actually throw off the original Nash Equilibrium, increase everyone’s travel time, and make all travelers worse off as a result.
This idea–that new paths and roads can […]

The answer to the above question has been proffered by Ronald S. Burt, a Hobart W. Williams Professor of Sociology and Strategy at University of Chicago School of Business. In his paper, http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/ronald.burt/research/SHGI.pdf, Burt proposes that one does not have to come up with a brilliant innovation in order to become creative but simply recognize […]

This article is about power and influence in social networks and their application to team sports. The article entitled “Game Plan - First Find the Leader,” published in BusinessWeek Online in August 2006, discusses the discovery of these social networking phenomena by Head Coach Sasho Cirovski of the University of Maryland Terrapins men’s soccer […]

Collaboration Networks, networks in which nodes represent researchers and edges between two nodes indicate collaboration on a paper, give a way of modeling the flow of ideas in the academic world.  In the paper “Some Analyses of Erdos Collaboration Graph”, the authors Vladimir Batagelj and Andrej Mrvar apply techniques of analyzing large graphs to the […]

The Internet revolution and Google have completely restructured information, giving more power to individuals in publishing their ideas on the Internet. Blogs, forums, Pod casts, groups, and personal pages have grown significantly, creating a plethora of individual written content. Our society has trusted Google as the industry leader in organizing all of the […]

“Mining the Web’s Link Structure”
Chakrabarti, S.; Dom, B.E.; Kumar, S.R.; Raghavan, P.; Rajagopalan, S.; Tomkins, A.; Gibson, D.; Kleinberg, J.
Computer Magazine
Volume: 32  Issue: 8  Aug 1999
Pages: 60-67
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/2/16967/00781636.pdf?tp=&arnumber=781636&isnumber=16967
In 1999, when this article was written, search engines were much more ineffective than they are today. Searches would often return with thousands of sites, many of them not […]