Related papers: On the Optimality and Predictability of Cultural M…

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…

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…

In social, economic and cultural situations in which the decisions of individuals are influenced directly by the decisions of others, there appears to be an inherently high level of ex ante unpredictability. In cultural markets such as…

This paper considers trial-offer markets where consumer preferences are modeled by a multinomial logit with social influence and position bias. The social signal for a product is given by its current market share raised to power r (or…

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…

Algorithms that favor popular items are used to help us select among many choices, from engaging articles on a social media news feed to songs and books that others have purchased, and from top-raked search engine results to highly-cited…

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…

Individuals often navigate several options with incomplete knowledge of their own preferences. Information provisioning tools such as public rankings and personalized recommendations have become central to helping individuals make choices,…

This paper studies ranking policies in a stylized trial-offer marketplace model, in which a single firm offers products and has consumers with heterogeneous preferences. Consumer trials are influenced by past purchases and the ranking of…

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…

Consumer behavior under social influence is a well-known phenomenon and computer scientists and economists are prevalently trying to analyze the dynamics behind decision making during the consumption process through agent-based modeling…

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…

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…

Online social networks are used to diffuse opinions and ideas among users, enabling a faster communication and a wider audience. The way in which opinions are conditioned by social interactions is usually called social influence. Social…

In social network markets, the act of consumer choice in these industries is governed not just by the set of incentives described by conventional consumer demand theory, but by the choices of others in which an individual's payoff is an…

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…

In this paper we introduce a mathematical model that captures some of the salient features of recommender systems that are based on popularity and that try to exploit social ties among the users. We show that, under very general conditions,…

Peer recommendation is a crowdsourcing task that leverages the opinions of many to identify interesting content online, such as news, images, or videos. Peer recommendation applications often use social signals, e.g., the number of prior…

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…

People are influenced by the choices of others, a phenomenon observed across contexts in the social and behavioral sciences. Social influence can lock in an initial popularity advantage of an option over a higher quality alternative. Yet…