Systemic Views from the Web

I listen to IEEE Spectrum Radio (here). Often that podcast takes a broad view of issues in various marketplaces. The article below relates to our previous post about Black Swan Events.

"Mediocrity beats unpredictability", here, posted in January 2009. The article starts off with "The holiday shopping season was a disaster for retailers... Only a select few did better than last year, including Walmart and Apple. ...ask yourself: which is better—a store with lots of stuff, some great, some not, or a consistent experience?" This is a discussion on why people choose consistency (even if mediocre) over randomly great/not-so-good. Arguably, this demonstrates one way in which the normal group behavior of people seems to avoid risk and uncertainty.