A wonderful, recent example of the fragility of an information cascade is the demise of the Atkins Diet craze that occurred earlier this decade. Its official website is www.atkins.com, but I have used its Wikipedia article – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atkins_Nutritional_Approach – as my main source of clarification. As the article explains, the diet was first created in […]

 http://www.shirky.com/writings/powerlaw_weblog.html
Classroom discussion has brought up the linking between weblogs (one of which I am linking myself in this post) as an example of a network governed by a power law distribution. The above article describes how this power law distribution arises, attributing the development of a seemingly more connected “community” within the larger network to […]

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/04/09/googlingyourdate.ap.ap/index.html
The article “googling your date” is about how social network sites are affecting the lives of people who are trying to discover information about a date via the internet. The article explains how the rules of dating have changed for better or worse. With websites like www.facebook.com and www.myspace.com, potential daters are looking […]

In an extremely interesting article in the Washington Post, an experiment was set up to see if commuters in a D.C. subway station would stop and listen to a musical performer. However, this was not any musician; the beggar leaning against the wall with his violin case open in front of him was violinist […]

Two major topics were discussed under the “The World-Wide Web and Information Access” of this course: keyword-based advertising and modelling the effectiveness of network communication through the concept of hubs and authorities. The former discussed the sale of online advertisements, i.e. links on a Google search page, using the familiar second price auction system taught […]

Herd mentality and information cascades seem to be the buzz words nowadays: every major online social forum, from YouTube to Facebook to Digg, has been analyzed as the result of the many following the opinions of the first few. Once enough people decide that something is or isn’t popular, the rest will follow in their […]

In network cascade theory, we see that people are like sheep, ie. they follow the current popular opinion. Whether it be what they eat, what they wear, where they live, what car they drive etc, most people will tend to follow the crowd. In thinking about this, there are two different categories of network cascades […]

http://www.jstor.org/view/00346527/di990706/99p03304/0?frame=noframe&userID=80fdba30@cornell.edu/01cce4406400501bc33
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The Economics of Rumors
In this work, the authors explore a family of models of information transmission processes in regard to an investment opportunity in which expected returns are known to few people. Each individual has a cost of undertaking the project and only receives information about which other agents invested. From this information, he would […]

Yesterday, AOL announced that it will begin selling some of it’s own search advertisements in order to increase its revenue. Back in 2005 Google and AOL (Time Warner) struck a deal in which Google bought a 5 percent stake in AOL, for $1 billion, and in return Google was allowed to sell all ads that […]

Article: “Value creation in fine arts: A system dynamics model of inverse demand and information cascades” by Philip Crossland and Faye L. Smith in Strategic Management Journal, May 2002
This article looks at information cascades in the fine arts market, specifically focusing on a company that produces porcelain sculptures of flowers and birds: Edward Marshall Boehm, […]