Movie Stars, Big Budgets, and Wide Releases: Empirical Analysis of the Blockbuster Strategy, a paper by Arthur De Vany and W. David Walls
Does the blockbuster strategy really make people herd to the movies? This is the theory that strong advertising, big-name stars, and huge opening nights are what make movies successful. […]

An information cascade results from people making decisions based on the decisions made before them. An example of this is when someone chooses the brand name product as opposed to the private label one simply because fewer boxes of the brand name are left on the shelf. The private label brand is cheaper but the […]

In class, we talked about the Web as a network. We also mentioned that much information on the Web is not indexed by search engines and is part of the internet’s “dark matter.” This content is also known as the deep Web, invisible Web, hidden Web, or Deepnet. The deep Web consists […]

This week, the USA Today printed an article titled “Princeton leads in grade deflation,” which addresses grade inflation at American universities, specifically, the Ivy League. I hope to show that Cornell should follow Princeton’s lead by discussing how inflation starts, why it is hard to leave, its consequences, and a potential fix.
The start of […]

http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-random27jul02,1,1850294,full.story?coll=la-headlines-magazine&ctrack=1&cset=true
It is a mystery to the even biggest Hollywood producers why some films that have 100 million dollar plus budgets fail while films sporting just a 60,000 dollar budget, such as the Blair Witch Project, go on to make millions.  A Los Angeles Times article entitled “Meet Hollywood’s Latest Genius” theorizes that it is the […]

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/writers/tom_verducci/03/20/matsuzaka0326/4.html (Begin at paragraph starting with “By 2005…”)
http://jpbpa.net/convention/2001_e.pdf (Starting with paragraph (9) to paragraph (12))
 
Baseball clubs in Major League Baseball are always trying to out compete each other in order to win a championship at the World Series. This competition occurs not only […]

Information Cascades seem to surround our everyday life. Think about what you’re doing right now, or what you’re wearing right now. Think about how you decided on your current car, or where you live, or even where to go to school. Many people evaluate all of their decisions with at least a […]

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-myspace-politics.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
 
In the New York Times article “Myspace Launches Politics Channel,” the plan for presidential candidates to come out on the Impact Channel on Myspace in an attempt to reach the younger online generation of voters was unveiled.  Political websites already exist, but this channel aims to directly target internet savvy voters by not only getting […]

http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/local/states/california/16893029.htm
Perhaps the most important advancement in the field of advertisement and maximizing revenue from advertising was Google’s innovation to auction off ad spots based on the keywords entered into their search engine. This enabled companies to display their ads only to search engine users who likely had some interest in their product–it would make no […]

            I’ve never really been a big user of blogs (this post will be my second ever) so I’m not sure if the system that has been set up for us has been successful or not by conventional standards.  That being said, one thing that bothers me about our NSDL resource is that […]