Let’s face it, after hearing about Spitzer’s adventures at The Emperor’s Club a couple of days ago, the first website most of you visited was not CNN.com, but MySpace - I know I did. After spending a couple (ok, give me more credit than that - 15) minutes looking at “Kristen’s” bikini picture, a thought […]

Digg Labs Swarm is a visualization that displays the most popular/most frequently viewed news articles on digg.com and shows how readers connect from one article to the next. A screen shot of the website can be seen below:

The visualization relates to our discussion in class about triadic closure - a property that is satisfied when […]

In class, we learned about Google advertising algorithm that is mainly used in Google AdWords. AdWords is Google’s advertising product and its main source of revenue. Advertisers bid on the word(s) that will trigger their aids when a user searches that word(s) on Google’s search engine. Therefore, Google not only revolutionize how people create searches […]

The future of television is of course going to be digital and HD, but it is also going to be watched strictly from the computer screen or a television which now are interchangeable. Computer users have the ability to watch an episode of say “The Office” on a wide screen HDTV, stop it […]

      Brokers connect two parties which do not have ties between them. As we covered in lecture, brokers can enjoy one’s power when they have no competition. In real life, it is easy to find brokers in many cases, ranging from brokers involved in relatively trite issues to ones involved in international issues. In my […]

http://seekingalpha.com/article/67381-cpc-advertising-takes-its-toll-on-google?source=financialcontent
In class, we have recently been discussing how Google auctions off its advertising slots. In short, Google uses a General Second Price bid auction (GSP) where the advertisers report some value per click on their advertisement. This value is taken as a bid which then is used to establish prices for the slot. […]

The United States government employed (directly or indirectly) many of the pioneers of game theory, and much of their time was spent considering the distinctly game-theoretic problems the Cold War presented. The Cold War was in some senses a game like any other in game theory, albeit on a much larger scale and with much […]

In “What was I thinking?” Elizabeth Kolbert reviews a new book by MIT economist Dan Ariely, “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions” (Harper, 2008). Kolbert begins her piece by describing a seemly irrational act of purchasing an additional book from Amazon simply to get free shipping. Throughout her review, she […]

The lingering threat of war between two nations is unsettling, especially if both sides understand the consequences of their actions.  A particular example of this is the Cold War, the power struggle between the US and the Soviet Union over nuclear arms, among other things.  In the article(see link at bottom of post), game theory […]

Google’s Wireless Auction Play
 
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is currently auctioning the rights to build a new wireless network. The current frontrunners in the bidding, which began on January 24th and will end soon, are AT&T and Verizon. Google was previously in contention, but withdrew after its bid of 4.7 billion was surpassed. […]