“Pyramiding: Efficient search for rare subjects”

By Eric von Hippel, Nikolaus Franke, Reinhard Prügl. 2009

798 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The need to economically identify rare subjects within large, poorly-mapped search spaces is a frequently-encountered problem for social scientists and managers. It is notoriously difficult, for example, to identify "the best new CEO for our company," or the "best three lead users to participate in our product development project." Mass screening of entire populations or samples becomes steadily more expensive as the number of acceptable solutions within the search space becomes rarer. The search strategy of "pyramiding" is a potential solution to this problem under many conditions. Pyramiding is a search process based upon the idea that people with a strong interest in a topic or field tend to know people more expert than themselves. In this paper we report upon four experiments empirically exploring the efficiency of pyramiding searches relative to mass screening. We find that pyramiding on average identified the most expert individual in a group on a specific topic with only 28.4% of the group interviewed - a great efficiency gain relative to mass screening. Further, pyramiding identified one of the top 3 experts in a population after interviewing only 15.9% of the group on average. We discuss conditions under which the pyramiding search method is likely to be efficient relative to screening.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/13a5b86b6967f1f77fb7dc15131189a717d5a934

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In Management Science and Operations Research

In Sociology and Political Science

In Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

Citations in the corpus

The value increment of mass-customized products: An empirical assessment (2006, background): “Using willingness-to-pay (WTP) measurements, Franke & Piller (2004) have recently shown that customers designing their own watches with design toolkits are willing to pay premiums of more than 100% (DWTP).”
It's the thought (and the Effort) That Counts: How Customizing for others Differs from Customizing for Oneself (2011, background): “——— and Frank Piller (2004), “Value Creation by Toolkits for User Innovation and Design: The Case of the Watch Market,” Journal of Product Innovation Management, 21 (6), 401–415.”
Bolstering and restoring feelings of competence via the IKEA effect (2012, background): “When consumers are involved in the production of a good and can customize it to their tastes, the good is more likely to meet their needs (Dellaert & Stremersch, 2005; Franke, Keinz, & Steger, 2009; Franke & Piller, 2004; Randall, Terwiesch, & Ulrich, 2007; Schreier, 2006; Simonson, 2005).”
Working consumers: the next step in marketing theory? (2009, background): “Furthermore, the more consumers are involved in co-production and design, the more they are willing to pay for the products, as Franke and Piller (2004) demonstrated with the watch toolkit case.”
Turning Open Innovation into Practice: Open Innovation Research through the Lens of Managers (2011, background): “The term OI has since then come to be associated with several things in different contexts, from open source (West and Gallagher, 2007) to user co-creation (Franke and Piller, 2004); user centered innovation and customer integration (Von Hippel, 2005) and distributed innovation (Sawhney and Prandell”
The effects of social media based brand communities on brand community markers, value creation practices, brand trust and brand loyalty (2012, background): “A new stream in the literature regards customers not as mere recipients of the products and values of the firm but as co-creators of value, competitive strategy and the firm's innovation processes (Franke & Piller, 2004; Schau et. al., 2009).”
The Psychological Effects of Empowerment Strategies on Consumers’ Product Demand (2010, background): “This strategy pays off if the extra cost of producing single-unit quantities is offset by the extra value customized products deliver to customers (Franke, Keinz, and Steger 2009; Franke and Piller 2004; Franke and Schreier 2008).”