This New York Times Magazine Article ”Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?” discusses how the entertainment industry relies on the hitting it real big with a blockbuster to offset many failed investments. But, what causes one artist to became enormously popular is hard to explain and explains why studio executives so bad at predicting which of their […]

StumbleUpon is a webservice which allows users to surf interesting sites based on links it feeds users via a browser toolbar. While this is clearly not the same exercise as searching for websites based on content, it does provide users with a way to find relevant information about certain channels which are popular within some […]

This post stems from today’s lecture on the Market for Lemons and my initial research for my paper. I’m interested in the effectiveness of modern recommendation engines, especially in the digital music market. Our discussion today came to the conclusion in that a simple market where buyers and sellers have imperfect or asymmetric information the […]

            Earlier today a friend of mine told me about a small argument he had with someone in a linguistics class about political correctness, its motivation and its effect on everyone.  From what I gather, the whole episode started with someone expressing displeasure with the ever-present influence of censorship that he/she feels limits the things […]

http://www.usatoday.com/money/advertising/2007-03-26-alpha-mom_N.htm
 
Where there are networks there are trends and where there are “alpha mom’s” there are networks. “Alpha mom’s” are modern mom’s who work, have money to spend, and also want to be the best moms they can be without sacrificing their own identities, and they have become a major target for marketing. This article from […]

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8435.html
http://www.amazon.com/Snipers-Shills-Sharks-Human-Behavior/dp/0691127131>
Princeton University Press has released a new book by Ken Stieglitz, a professor of computer science at Princeton. His book, “Snipers, Shills, and Sharks: eBay and Human Behavior” is being marketed as an introduction to auction theory in the form of a mass market book about eBay. The book’s introduction, available on Amazon.com, outlines the […]

One commonly cited example of the network effect is the battle between two video formats in the 1980’s: VHS and Beta. We are lucky enough to be in the middle of a similar battle right now, in the form of HD DVD versus Blu-ray. Unlike VHS vs. Beta, neither of the two new […]

The majority of initial hits on Google returns for “Schelling’s Segregation Model” link to websites containing applets allowing you to watch the model at work. Not only is this tool entertaining to play with but it also offers insight into deeper cultural questions. In particular, three professors from UCLA, Sander, Schreiber, and Doherty, were interested […]

In class we discussed the need for a business to create a cascade by forcing the demand for the product past an early critical point. If such an accomplishment is reached, then users will most likely continue demanding the product until another critical “point of saturation” is reached. The key issue was how […]