One of the easiest ways to see the trickle down effect was described briefly in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. Malcolm talks of how one fashion trend, the Hush Puppies shoes, were able to come out of near death because of a few trend-setting hipsters. But what does Miranda Priestly, Meryl Streep’s fashion editor […]

http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/reg14n4-inhaber.html
I found this article on the Cato Institute’s website as part of their Regulation magazine. Quoting directly from the About section of their site, “The Cato Institute was founded in 1977 by Edward H. Crane. It is a non-profit public policy research foundation headquartered in Washington, D.C. The Cato Institute seeks to broaden […]

Even though information cascades with and without direct effects have dominated our classroom discussion lately, this entry is going to go back to our discussion of auctions. The article discusses some of the accomplishments of William Vickery (the William Vickery of VCG prices) and how he integrated the concepts of game theory and auctions. […]

During the height of the Beanie Baby craze in the late 90s, throngs of buyers scooped up the little collectibles, hoping that their purchases might lead to future riches. The manufacturer’s plan to introduce a multitude of new characters to the Beanie Baby lineup led people to feel compelled to purchase as many […]

The article “Amazon Rival Adopts Customer Recommendation Scheme” describes the recent actions of The Nile, an online bookstore similar to Amazon.com.  The site is targeted toward people in Australia and Asia.  The Nile will use software from Avail Intelligence to create customer recommendations, similar to the feature on Amazon.  With this “word-of-mouth” technology, users of […]

             In the article “Hollywood Economics: How extreme uncertainty shapes the film industry,” author Arthur Vany explores how movies are in fact an information cascade.  He claims that movies that have lots of special effects, a big budget, and are filled with well-known big stars will attract more viewers because it is essentially an information […]

The Google search engine has been a great tool for businesses to get their name out to consumers by biddign to have their name as top results from searches.
 However, a new tool by Goolge is angering businesses and have them questioning the monopoly Google is buiding for search engines.  This tool allows people to […]

We have talked about a few ways to increase Google rankings of an existing page for common queries in class. A “Googlebomb” refers to a prank people attempt to cause someone else’s site to rank high for an obscure or meaningless query. An example of such prank is a search for “miserable failure” on Google […]

As more social networking tools, like Facebook, begin to take over the internet, we are going to see a change in the way advertising works. Facebook has already taken a stab at this and has broken through the boundaries of conventional advertising of click through rates that we have talked about in class. Instead, they […]

Greg Mankiw, an economist at Harvard has posted to his blog, an application of Bayes rule to the 2008 Presidential Election. He finds election probabilities from the website Intrade and defines the necessary variables as follows:
“Let A be the event that a candidate wins the general election, and B be the event that a candidate […]