An information cascade occurs when individuals adopt a new behavior based on the signals and actions of individuals surrounding them. We can also treat this propagation of a new behavior throughout a network as games played between individuals in which the superior strategy is “passed down” to individuals in the “outer levels” of the network. […]

 Racial networks can be represented, in network theory, by groups that have links to each other, and fewer individual links to other racial networks. These groups help sustain triadic closure between other racial networks, which creates a great amount of stability with the whole worldwide racial network. Several articles I have read talk about how […]

The Erdös Number Project
Just as the idea of the small-world phenomenon famously inspired “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” in the movie industry, so too do mathematicians have their own version of the game. This one centers around the late Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös, who had a reputation for, among other things, publishing an incredibly […]

article:  The Sky-high Club
James Surowiecki, the author of The Wisdom of Crowds, wrote an article for the New Yorker on the finding that CEO connections lead to increased pay.  He begins the article by discussing the ex-CEO of Home Depot, who was given two hundred million dollars despite the fact that he did not do […]

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/112726409/ABSTRACT 
 In the paper “Hierarchical Reporting, Aggregation, andInformation Cascades”, the authors (Anil Arya, Jonathan Glover and Brian Mittendorf ) illustrate how a cascade can decide the outcome of a decision in a hierarchical organization and how that can be prevented. In their model, a firm consists of 3 tiers – there are 3 lowest level managers, a middle […]

Stanley Milgram’s small-world experiment, popularly termed as the “six degrees of separation” model, claimed that two perfectly random people were typically only six connections away from each other, assuming a connection to be an acquaintance they knew by name. The threory essentially made the world seem a lot small, by proving that we were all […]

Three years before the Cuban Missile Crisis, noted philosopher Bertrand Russell compared nuclear brinkmanship to a game of Chicken; the idea that superpowers should stockpile nuclear weapons and make generally vague yet scary threats against each other in order to create situations more advantageous to them was analogous to two reckless car drivers waiting until […]

I have been a major league baseball fan for years, but it was not until last week during one of my routine visits to my favorite baseball team’s website (which shall remain nameless as I am embarrassed by their performance), that I realized a small ad in the lower left corner of the screen. […]

Normally, social networking sites are designed to allow people to make connections that they previously would not have been able to make. This one is different. Instead of helping you find new social links, famiva.com simply brings out the ones that are already there. Not just any links, only the most important […]

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=a8XwoOb8Nczo&refer=japan
This article deals with Toyota’s new division called Scion. Scions are marketed towards younger people. Toyota’s plan is simple; they sell cheap reliable cars, and market them solely to “edgy young dudes of the world.” This means that they are not advertising through the usual mediums of TV and print. Instead all advertisements are being […]