Related papers: Disentangling the Effects of Social Signals

Ranking algorithms play a crucial role in online platforms ranging from search engines to recommender systems. In this paper, we identify a surprising consequence of popularity-based rankings: the fewer the items reporting a given signal,…

We have conducted three empirical studies of the effects of friend recommendations and general ratings on how online users make choices. These two components of social influence were investigated through user studies on Mechanical Turk. We…

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…

Online marketplaces, search engines, and databases employ aggregated social information to rank their content for users. Two ranking heuristics commonly implemented to order the available options are the average review score and item…

Recommender systems learn from historical users' feedback that is often non-uniformly distributed across items. As a consequence, these systems may end up suggesting popular items more than niche items progressively, even when the latter…

Many online platforms predominantly rank items by predicted user engagement. We believe that there is much unrealized potential in including non-engagement signals, which can improve outcomes both for platforms and for society as a whole.…

Recommendation systems are pervasive in the digital economy. An important assumption in many deployed systems is that user consumption reflects user preferences in a static sense: users consume the content they like with no other…

Social media feeds have become central to the Internet. Among the most visible are trending feeds, which rank content deemed timely and relevant. To examine how feed signals influence behaviors and perceptions, we conducted a randomized…

The ever-increasing amount of information flowing through Social Media forces the members of these networks to compete for attention and influence by relying on other people to spread their message. A large study of information propagation…

Popularity systems, like Twitter retweets, Reddit upvotes, and Pinterest pins have the potential to guide people toward posts that others liked. That, however, creates a feedback loop that reduces their informativeness: items marked as more…

Predicting the future popularity of online content is highly important in many applications. Preferential attachment phenomena is encountered in scale free networks.Under it's influece popular items get more popular thereby resulting in…

Network-based people recommendation algorithms are widely employed on the Web to suggest new connections in social media or professional platforms. While such recommendations bring people together, the feedback loop between the algorithms…

Social network websites, such as Facebook, YouTube, Lastfm etc, have become a popular platform for users to connect with each other and share content or opinions. They provide rich information for us to study the influence of user's social…

Theoretical work on sequential choice and large-scale experiments in online ranking and voting systems has demonstrated that social influence can have a drastic impact on social and technological systems. Yet, the effect of social influence…

Recommender system usually suffers from severe popularity bias -- the collected interaction data usually exhibits quite imbalanced or even long-tailed distribution over items. Such skewed distribution may result from the users' conformity…

Social learning is a fundamental mechanism shaping decision-making across numerous social networks, including social trading platforms. In those platforms, investors combine traditional investing with copying the behavior of others.…

The pervasive rise of digital platforms has reshaped how individuals engage with information, with algorithms and peer influence playing pivotal roles in these processes. This study investigates the effects of algorithmic curation and peer…

Social scientists have long sought to understand why certain people, items, or options become more popular than others. One seemingly intuitive theory is that inherent value drives popularity. An alternative theory claims that popularity is…

Recommendation algorithms are susceptible to popularity bias: a tendency to recommend popular items even when they fail to meet user needs. A related issue is that the recommendation quality can vary by demographic groups. Marginalized…

This paper provides a simple theoretical framework to evaluate the effect of key parameters of ranking algorithms, namely popularity and personalization parameters, on measures of platform engagement, misinformation and polarization. The…