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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…
The role of recommendation systems in the diversity of content consumption on platforms is a much-debated issue. The quantitative state of the art often overlooks the existence of individual attitudes toward guidance, and eventually of…
Recommender systems have gained increasing attention to personalise consumer preferences. While these systems have primarily focused on applications such as advertisement recommendations (e.g., Google), personalized suggestions (e.g.,…
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…
Algorithms have an increasing influence on the music that we consume and understanding their behavior is fundamental to make sure they give a fair exposure to all artists across different styles. In this on-going work we contribute to this…
Consumer agency in the digital age is increasingly constrained by systemic barriers and algorithmic manipulation, raising concerns about the authenticity of consumption choices. Nowadays, financial decisions are shaped by external pressures…
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…
Understanding how cognitive and social mechanisms shape the evolution of complex artifacts such as songs is central to cultural evolution research. Social network topology (what artifacts are available?), selection (which are chosen?), and…
Music preferences are strongly shaped by the cultural and socio-economic background of the listener, which is reflected, to a considerable extent, in country-specific music listening profiles. Previous work has already identified several…
Musical tastes reflect our unique values and experiences, our relationships with others, and the places where we live. But as each of these things changes, do our tastes also change to reflect the present, or remain fixed, reflecting our…
Finding the music of the moment can often be a challenging problem, even for well-versed music listeners. Musical tastes are constantly in flux, and the problem of developing computational models for musical taste dynamics presents a rich…
Recommender systems shape music listening worldwide due to their widespread adoption on online platforms. Growing concerns about representational harms that these systems may cause are increasingly part of the scientific and public debate,…
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…
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…
Music recommender systems have become central parts of popular streaming platforms such as Last.fm, Pandora, or Spotify to help users find music that fits their preferences. These systems learn from the past listening events of users to…
In order to truly understand how social media might shape online discourses or contribute to societal polarization, we need refined models of platform choice, that is: models that help us understand why users prefer one social media…
Algorithmic recommender systems such as Spotify and Netflix affect not only consumer behavior but also producer incentives. Producers seek to create content that will be shown by the recommendation algorithm, which can impact both the…
This exercise proposes a learning mechanism to model economic agent's decision-making process using an actor-critic structure in the literature of artificial intelligence. It is motivated by the psychology literature of learning through…
The task of a music recommender system is to predict what music item a particular user would like to listen to next. This position paper discusses the main challenges of the music preference prediction task: the lack of information on the…
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…