title: Quantifying social influence in an online cultural market.
abstract: We revisit experimental data from an online cultural market in which 14,000 users interact to download songs, and develop a simple model that can explain seemingly complex outcomes. Our results suggest that individual behavior is characterized by a two-step process--the decision to sample and the decision to download a song. Contrary to conventional wisdom, social influence is material to the first step only. The model also identifies the role of placement in mediating social signals, and suggests that in this market with anonymous feedback cues, social influence serves an informational rather than normative role.
authors.affiliation: Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America. kak@mit.edu
authors.forename: Coco
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Krumme
authors.forename: Manuel
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Cebrian
authors.forename: Galen
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Pickard
authors.forename: Sandy
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Pentland
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D040241:Social Marketing; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors