Abstract

Unpredictability is often portrayed as an undesirable outcome of social influence in cultural markets. Unpredictability stems from the "rich get richer" effect, whereby small fluctuations in the market share or popularity of products are amplified over time by social influence. In this paper, we report results of an experimental study that shows that unpredictability is not an inherent property of social influence. We investigate strategies for creating markets in which the popularity of products is better-and more predictably-aligned with their underlying quality. For our study, we created a cultural market of science stories and conducted randomized experiments on different policies for presenting the stories to study participants. Specifically, we varied how the stories were ranked, and whether or not participants were shown the ratings these stories received from others. We present a policy that leverages social influence and …

Date

April 3, 2017

Authors

Andrés Abeliuk, Gerardo Berbeglia, Pascal Van Hentenryck, Tad Hogg, Kristina Lerman

Book

Proceedings of the 26th international conference on world wide web

Pages

745-754