2009/08/10 by Paul Ormerod, K. Glass, Kristin Glass · 3 citations
Decision Sciences · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Artificial intelligence #Computer science #Economics #Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation #Ex-ante #Game Theory and Applications #Identification (biology) #Machine learning #Operations research #Opinion Dynamics and Social Influence #Predictability #Process (computing) #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/978-3-642-12079-4_44
published in Lecture notes in computer science, 354-359 (Springer Science+Business Media)
arxiv created 2009/08/10 · openalex publication_date 2010/01/01 · arxiv updated 2015/05/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
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 films, songs and books, well-informed experts routinely make predictions which turn out to be incorrect. We examine the extent to which the existence of social influence may, somewhat paradoxically, increase the extent to which winners can be identified at a very early stage in the process. Once the process of choice has begun, only a very small number of decisions may be necessary to give a reasonable prospect of being able to identify the eventual winner. We illustrate this by an analysis of the music download experiments of Salganik et.al. (2006). We derive a rule for early identification of the eventual winner. Although not perfect, it gives considerable practical success. We validate the rule by applying it to similar data not used in the process of constructing the rule.