Choose your friends wisely: the behavioral influence of social networks

Posted on May 12, 2010 by Bill Petti

The concepts of “peer pressure” and “running with the wrong crowd” are far from new.  For quite some time, people have explicitly or implicitly explained their or other people’s behavior by referencing the influence that one’s social circle can bring to bear. Nicholas Christakis is a leading researcher focusing on the ways in which the [...]

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Crowdsourcing Problems, Revisited

Posted on April 24, 2010 by Bill Petti

Last year I explored the idea of crowdsourcing problems.  The gist of the post was: The crowdsourcing of problems could accelerate the time it takes businesses to identify gaps in current product or service offerings and spend more time developing better solutions to those problems for businesses and/or consumers. Of course, the danger is that [...]

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Does Social Science Training make us Selfish and Immoral?

Posted on February 18, 2010 by Bill Petti

Tim Hartford (whose blog at FT.com you really must read) discusses the results of a recent survey that suggest the answer is yes: A recent survey by Yoram Bauman and Elaina Rose, two economists from the University of Washington, explains that in experiments, economics students are less generous, more likely to choose an unco-operative approach [...]

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Applying Social Science Concepts to Business: E-Book Edition

Posted on January 31, 2010 by Bill Petti

Sunday’s Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon has stopped selling Kindle versions of all Macmillan titles.  John Sargent, Macmillian’s CEO, recently went to Amazon’s headquarters to try and negotiate new terms for the sale of e-books published by his company.  In general, the publishing industry has been unhappy with Amazon’s insistence that most books be [...]

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All the net’s a stage

Posted on October 28, 2009 by Bill Petti

Andy Oram over at O’Reilly Radar writes a really interesting piece on the work of Erving Goffman and how it relates to identity and the web: [Goffman's] fundamental contribution is how he slants his premise that we present a front in all our behavior before others. You have to understand that this posturing is real [...]

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More Momentum for the Social Sciences–Nobel Edition

Posted on October 14, 2009 by Bill Petti

For those that have not yet heard, the Nobel Prize for Economics (actually named the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) was awarded this year to two recipients, one of whom–Elinor Ostrom–is a Political Scientist.  As Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution notes: It’s a nod in the direction of social [...]

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Crowdsourcing Data Coding

Posted on September 16, 2009 by Bill Petti

I just finished watching the video below of CrowdFlower’s presentation at the TechCrunch50 conference.  CrowdFlower is a plaform that allows firms to crowdsource various tasks, such as populating a spreadsheet with email addresses or selecting stills from thousands of videos that have particular qualities.  The examples in the video include very labor intensive tasks, but [...]

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The ‘Soft Sciences’ to get their Day?

Posted on September 11, 2009 by Bill Petti

In a recent report, Garnter proposes that as corporations try to benefit from the growth of social media they will come to rely more and more on employees with formal, advanced training in the social sciences. Gartner Vice President Kathy Harris discusses in some detail four areas of jobs needed in the near future. Though [...]

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