http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/science/09tier.html?_r=2&em&ex=1192248000&en=9f36687fe8aef756&ei=5087%0A&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
In yesterday’s lecture, we began discussing information cascades. The above referenced New York Times article highlights a very interesting cascade whose effect can still be seen prevalent today. In his article, John Tierney discusses the book “Good Calories, Bad Calories” by Gary Taubes. In the book, Taubes describes an inaccurate cascade about heart disease […]

http://www.utalkmarketing.com/pages/Article.aspx?ArticleID=4789&Title=Recession_fears_impact_on_online_ad_spend
“Recession fears impact on online ad spend”
Despite the fact that U.S. economy is gradually falling into recession, market research specialists still estimate that advertisers will spend an increase of 23% over 2007’s spending online, which is equivalent to $25.8 billion. And there are several key factors behind this phenomenon, including better understanding of the audience, […]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/ptech/03/21/youtube.awards.ap/index.html
This news article is mainly on reporting videos that won awards from YouTube, which allows its users to nominate 6 videos for each of its 12 award categories. These categories are music, sports, comedy, instructional, short film, inspirational, commentary, creative, politics, series, eyewitness and “adorable.” The awards have allowed […]

In a social network, there is a tendency for two people with a mutual friend to form some sort of link. This is known as triadic closure. The basic principle behind this idea is that new links are likely to form between people with one or more common friends due to a number of factors: […]

The second price (sealed bid) auction runs the same as the first price auction, except the winner pays the second highest bid. Today, eBay is one of the most popular second price auctions (along with Google, Amazon.com, AuctionWatch.com and Yahoo!, etc) in the markets. According to eBay’s second price auction, each buyer specifies their maximum […]

According to this article, the market did not do well yesterday, and the primary reason was that indicators such as falling consumer confidence, housing prices, and inflation in other sectors induced people to stop spending and further injure the economy thus lowering the Dow Jones Industrial Average. This may seem to make perfect sense, […]

In accordance with the topic of the Information Cascade, a recent study was published which analyzed how likely college level students are to click a link from a Google search based on the abstract relevance and its position on the page (see http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue3/pan.html).
The results of the study indicate that college students are influenced both by […]

When Google was founded in 1998, the standard for Internet service was still dialup – barely sufficient to support “media-rich” sites, let alone streaming video. Search engines were confined to plain text in the interest of speed. Today, with most internet users connecting by broadband, high-bandwidth implementations of search engines can have expanded abilities. One […]

Section 6 in Chapter 10 talks about how link analysis is applied in modern web search. This online article would be a good source for one who wants to know more about in what direction current link analysis would be improved by major search engines. The article can be found at: http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3628767
In this article, Andrew […]

The concept of informational cascades seems to have a large following in academic circles. It is such an attractive idea because it offers a rational explanation for what appears to be irrational “herd-like” behavior. Information cascade theory is used to describe a situation in which an individual makes a decisions based on the actions of […]