Taming the unpredictability of cultural markets with social influence

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 pr..