The Benefits of Social Influence in Optimized Cultural Markets
By Andrés Abeliuk, Gerardo Berbeglia, Manuel Cebrián, Pascal Van Hentenryck. 2015
26 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Social influence has been shown to create significant unpredictability in cultural markets, providing one potential explanation why experts routinely fail at predicting commercial success of cultural products. As a result, social influence is often presented in a negative light. Here, we show the benefits of social influence for cultural markets. We present a policy that uses product quality, appeal, position bias and social influence to maximize expected profits in the market. Our computational experiments show that our profit-maximizing policy leverages social influence to produce significant performance benefits for the market, while our theoretical analysis proves that our policy outperforms in expectation any policy not displaying social signals. Our results contrast with earlier work which focused on showing the unpredictability and inequalities created by social influence. Not only do we show for the first time that, under our policy, dynamically showing consumers positive social signals increases the expected profit of the seller in cultural markets. We also show that, in reasonable settings, our profit-maximizing policy does not introduce significant unpredictability and identifies “blockbusters”. Overall, these results shed new light on the nature of social influence and how it can be leveraged for the benefits of the market.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Economics and Econometrics
In Safety Research
- Tad Hogg
- Felipe Maldonado
- Kristina Lerman
- Franco Berbeglia
- Gerardo Berbeglia
- Andrés Abeliuk
- Pascal Van Hentenryck
In Sociology and Political Science
- Kristina Lerman
- Gerardo Berbeglia
- Andrés Abeliuk
- Pascal Van Hentenryck
- Tad Hogg
- Felipe Maldonado
- Franco Berbeglia
Citations in the corpus
- Disentangling the Effects of Social Signals (2014, background): “The results of these experiments may help the development of algorithms to control collective performance (Abeliuk et al., 2015).”
- Aligning Popularity and Quality in Online Cultural Markets (2021, methodology): “Since the performance ranking maximizes the expected purchases at each iteration, it dominates all other policies in this setting (Abeliuk et al. 2015a).”
- Taming the Unpredictability of Cultural Markets with Social Influence (2017, background): “[14] is a good policy making tool that helps analyze collective behavior in cultural markets under different policies [1, 2, 25] and contributes to continue building our understanding of the nature of social influence and to determine how best to use it.”