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Over the past decade there has been a growing public fascination with the complex "connectedness" of modern society. This connectedness is found in many incarnations: in the rapid growth of the Internet and the Web, in the ease with which global communication now takes place, and in the ability of news and information as well as epidemics and financial crises to spread around the world with surprising speed and intensity. These are phenomena that involve networks, incentives, and the aggregate behavior of groups of people; they are based on the links that connect us and the ways in which each of our decisions can have subtle consequences for the outcomes of everyone else.

Networks, Crowds, and Markets combines different scientific perspectives in its approach to understanding networks and behavior. Drawing on ideas from economics, sociology, computing and information science, and applied mathematics, it describes the emerging field of study that is growing at the interface of all these areas, addressing fundamental questions about how the social, economic, and technological worlds are connected.

The book is based on an inter-disciplinary course entitled Networks that we teach at Cornell. The book, like the course, is designed at the introductory undergraduate level with no formal prerequisites. To support deeper explorations, most of the chapters are supplemented with optional advanced sections.

When it comes to releasing source code, I’ve always been torn. I really believe in the philosophy of open source, but I’m intimidated by putting my code out there for everyone to see. Underneath it all, I’m probably scared of being exposed as some kind of a charlatan (”You call that programming?”). So, to pre-empt that possibility, I’ll start by saying this: I’m not a great programmer. My code is clean and fairly well-structured, but don’t expect to find any particularly advanced code wizardry or complicated mathematics. I do, however, think that the projects that I’ll be sharing over the week contain some good ideas, and a lot of helpful techniques. Hopefully you’ll find one or all of them useful.