Robert Shiller recently made an application about the incompleteness of information cascades and its dangerous attributes to the recent housing bubble. But what if the information that cascades is more opinionated than informational? An example of this is the critic industry. How many of us have seen a movie or eaten at a restaurant at […]

http://www.ohio.com/editorial/commentary/16246947.html?page=1&c=y
The Akron Beacon Journal discusses the recent housing bubble and the failure of economic experts to recognize the problem. They quote Alan Greenspan’s autobiography, saying, “I’d come to realize that we’d never be able to identify irrational exuberance with certainty, much less act on it, until after the fact”. The article introduces the […]

According to class material, Web search was initially supposed to only help users find relevant and useful pages. However, due to the exponential growth of the Web, it is impossible to prevent search engines from turning into profitable money-making machines. For search sites like Google, this industry makes up most of its revenue.
To increase effectiveness, […]

“’Q. Why would I want to join an inexplicable mob?
A. Tons of other people are doing it.’”
–Bill Wasik, “My Crowd” Harpers Magazine. Mar 2006, Vol. 312 Issue 1870, p56-66.
A monument both to the potential vacuousness of “information” cascades and the way individuals and other actors learn to coopt the social environment surrounding them, the Flash […]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/business/02view.html?_r=1&oref=slogin This article is about some of the reasons the experts did not detect the housing bubble before it happened.  Much of what happened was because many of the top experts, including Alan Greenspan, thought the housing bubble was not going to be a bubble, but a ”froth”.  This is a term used by Greenspan to […]

Microsoft has an interesting project that they are presenting at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, which is occurring right now (Microsoft’s project will be presented this Wednesday). Blews is a project that hopes to show what the political blogosphere tells us about news. Its goal is to move a step beyond typical […]

This academic paper, “Oxytocin Increases Generosity in Humans,” details the study of the effect on material generosity from greater-than-normal doses of a hormone in a small sample of test subjects. The game used during the experiment is a variation of the money-splitting game we considered as part of our exploration of network exchange theory.
In […]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/business/30fund.html?ref=yourmoney
As of now, the news of Bear Stearns has become widespread. With company stock valued at merely $10, Bear employees who had invested one-third of the company stock lost a majority of their personal wealth. Similar to the case of Enron, the collapse of the company also shattered the personal wealth of employees who held […]

Apparently in the United States alone, there are around 20 million stamp collectors — it’s one of the most popular hobbies in the world. It makes sense; the rarest of stamps have sold for amounts on the order of millions of dollars, and less rare stamps can sell for tens of thousands. Clearly, […]

What scares me most about information cascades is our society’s complete reliance on what we hear. Like one of our childhood rumors we let the decisions of others guide us almost blindly and take what is said for granted without a second thought. As I think about some of the products that have recently been […]