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Individuals are often influenced by the behavior of others, for instance because they wish to obtain the benefits of coordinated actions or infer otherwise inaccessible information. In such situations this social influence decreases the ex…
Social influence is ubiquitous in cultural markets, from book recommendations in Amazon, to song popularities in iTunes and the ranking of newspaper articles in the online edition of the New York Times to mention only a few. Yet social…
Social influence has been shown to create significant unpredictability in cultural markets, providing one potential explanation why experts routinely fail at predicting commercial success of cultural products. To counteract the difficulty…
Can we predict the future popularity of a song, movie or tweet? Recent work suggests that although it may be hard to predict an item's popularity when it is first introduced, peeking into its early adopters and properties of their social…
The dynamical evolution of many economic, sociological, biological and physical systems tends to be dominated by a relatively small number of unexpected, large changes (`extreme events'). We study the large, internal changes produced in a…
A quantitative understanding of societies requires useful combinations of empirical data and mathematical models. Models of cultural dynamics aim at explaining the emergence of culturally homogeneous groups through social influence.…
Understanding the dynamics of opinions, preferences and of culture as whole requires more use of empirical data than has been done so far. It is clear that an important role in driving this dynamics is played by social influence, which is…
Predicting when an individual will adopt a new behavior is an important problem in application domains such as marketing and public health. This paper examines the perfor- mance of a wide variety of social network based measurements…
How does the visual design of digital platforms impact user behavior and the resulting environment? A body of work suggests that introducing social signals to content can increase both the inequality and unpredictability of its success, but…
This work is concerned with the dynamics of online cultural markets, namely, attention allocation of many users on a set of digital goods with infinite supply. Such dynamic is important in shaping processes and outcomes in society, from…
We consider hundreds of thousands of individual economic transactions to ask: how predictable are consumers in their merchant visitation patterns? Our results suggest that, in the long-run, much of our seemingly elective activity is…
Different measures have been proposed to predict whether individuals will adopt a new behavior in online social networks, given the influence produced by their neighbors. In this paper, we show one can achieve significant improvement over…
Prediction markets are powerful tools to elicit and aggregate beliefs from strategic agents. However, in current prediction markets, agents may exhaust the social welfare by competing to be the first to update the market. We initiate the…
We propose a simple model of an idealized online cultural market in which $N$ items, endowed with a hidden quality metric, are recommended to users by a ranking algorithm possibly biased by the current items' popularity. Our goal is to…
Many data mining approaches aim at modelling and predicting human behaviour. An important quantity of interest is the quality of model-based predictions, e.g. for finding a competition winner with best prediction performance. In real life,…
The outcomes of elections, product sales, and the structure of social connections are all determined by the choices individuals make when presented with a set of options, so understanding the factors that contribute to choice is crucial. Of…
It is widely believed that one's peers influence product adoption behaviors. This relationship has been linked to the number of signals a decision-maker receives in a social network. But it is unclear if these same principles hold when the…
Imitation is a key component of human social behavior, and is widely used by both children and adults as a way to navigate uncertain or unfamiliar situations. But in an environment populated by multiple heterogeneous agents pursuing…
We present a mechanism design, coupling an online collaboration software and a prediction market, which allows tracking down the very roots of individual incentives, actions and how these behaviors influence collective intelligence in terms…
Social interactions and personal tastes shape our consumption behavior of cultural products. In this study, we present a computational model of a cultural market and we aim to analyze the behavior of the consumer population as an emergent…