Globalization and expansion of markets are popular phenomena in the contemporary world. It is important, nowadays, for producers to consider the market potential and the speed of diffusion in international markets but these factors vary greatly across countries. A paper by researchers at the Yale School of Management discusses the cross-national market penetration factors that […]

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/game-theory/#Behav
Although this article is long, I will focus on the section titled, Game Theory and Behavioral Evidence. One of the major criticisms of game theory is that it does not make specific enough predictions and that it does not adequately predict behavior. The assumption that the players be perfectly rational is argued by […]

Discover magazine recently had an interesting article the connectedness of the blogosphere. Since the web is so dynamic, with new blogs being created almost constantly (about one every 2 seconds) and outdated blogs being deleted/disconnected from the connected component of the blogosphere at a similar (but much slower) rate, it is hard to model […]

In the paper The Small World Web by Lada A. Adamic, the author attempts to demonstrate that the largest strongly connected component of the link graph representing the internet satisfies the small world phenomenon. That is, he shows that sites in the largest component are separated by an average of […]

The following article takes a look at how information diffuses throughout blogs: http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/990000/988739/p491-gruhl.pdf?key1=988739&key2=5402837711&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=20792120&CFTOKEN=30091602
There were two levels of analysis involved in this study. First they considered a topical approach: seeing how various world events and even local events affected spread topics throughout blogs. The researchers called this approach the “macroscopic” approach. […]

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/99/9/5766.pdf
Duncan Watts’ 2001 paper “A simple model of global cascades on random networks” analyzes the conditions under which global information cascades occur, using a simple model with varying parameters. A global information cascade is just a cascade that influences most of the nodes in a large network, initially formed by a small number […]

We recently focused on simple tipping phenomena. Typically, these models involve a strictly increasing function, where the number of people attending rises with people expected to attend. However, what if, at some point, additional forces cause this function to begin to decrease - congestion costs, for example?
(Much of the mathematics behind this is […]

In class we discussed the characteristics of the market for lemons. In this case there is asymmetric information between the buyer and seller. While presumably the seller knows whether the car is good or not, the buyer cannot tell. This situation is very similar to the online market of buyers and […]

 
“Yahoo’s Undercover Social Network”

 
http://blogs.business2.com/utilitybelt/2007/04/yahoos_undercov.html
In the world of Internet social networks, whose dominant participants are those such as Myspace and Match.com, a new player has emerged. According to the article “Yahoo’s Undercover Social Network,” Yahoo Answers is the fastest growing component of Yahoo. In the past year Yahoo Answers has more than quadrupled its […]

Network Effects and Comeptition: An Empirical Analysis of the Home Video Game Industry
An article published a little while back in Wiley InterScience takes a very interesting look into the role network effects and externalities play in the video game industry. How does network size (user base) aid or harm a major competitor in this industry? […]