** My Intellectual Flakes **

 There is an interesting article by Duncan Watts on NY Times concerning how the aggregate display influence people’s preference and online behavior.

The common-sense view, however, makes a big assumption: that when people make decisions about what they like, they do so independently of one another. But people almost never make decisions independently — in part because the world abounds with so many choices that we have little hope of ever finding what we want on our own; in part because we are never really sure what we want anyway; and in part because what we often want is not so much to experience the “best” of everything as it is to experience the same things as other people and thereby also experience the benefits of sharing.

In the experimental study he conducted, the “social influence” group were exposed to various aggregate data such as total download times of songs. In the control group, participants made decisions independently. The results showed that in the social influence group, the most popular songs became much more popular. In accordance with cumulative advantage theory, the introduction of social elements not only made rich became richer, but also made the results more unpredictable.

Because the long-run success of a song depends so sensitively on the decisions of a few early-arriving individuals, whose choices are subsequently amplified and eventually locked in by the cumulative-advantage process, and because the particular individuals who play this important role are chosen randomly and may make different decisions from one moment to the next, the resulting unpredictability is inherent to the nature of the market.