At a time when information seekers first turn to digital sources for news and opinion, it is critical that we understand the role that social media plays in human behavior. This is especially true when information consumers also act as information producers and editors through their online activity. In order to better understand the effects that editorial ratings have on online human behavior, we report the results of a two large-scale in-vivo experiments in social media. We find that small, random rating manipulations on social media posts and comments created significant changes in downstream ratings resulting in significantly different final outcomes. We found positive herding effects for positive treatments on posts, increasing the final rating by 11.02 on average, but not for positive treatments on comments. Contrary to the results of related work, we found negative herding effects for negative treatments on posts and comments, decreasing the final ratings on average, of posts by 5.15 and of comments by 37.4 . Compared to the control group, the probability of reaching a high rating (>=2000) for posts is increased by 24.6 when posts receive the positive treatment and for comments is decreased by 46.6 when comments receive the negative treatment.
In a separate line of work, Sorensen used mistaken omissions of books from the bestsellers list to identify the boost in sales that accompany the perceived popularity of a book's appearance on the list @cite_2 . Similarly, when the download counters for different software labels were randomly increased, Hanson and Putler found that users are significantly more likely to download software that had the largest counter increase @cite_57 . Salganik and Watts performed a study to determine the extent to which perception of quality becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.'' In their experiment they inverted the true popularity of songs in an online music marketplace, and found that the perceived-but-false-popularity became real over time @cite_19 .
@cite_57 @cite_19 @cite_2
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This article presents the results of a market experiment in which the perceived popularity of programs on a large commercial online system were manipulated. The download counts of software, which indicate how many previous users had obtained a software program, were artificially increased by repeated downloading. This manipulation was done to one member of a matched program pair, with the manipulation levels set randomly to achieve a balanced experimental design over a set of matched pairs. Subsequent downloads of the programs made by the service's subscribers were then recorded. Substantial additional downloads were induced by the manipulation. Some consumers apparently are drawn to market leaders, further increasing their lead. This raises an important issue regarding the need for verifiability of online popularity measures. Individuals influence each others' decisions about cultural products such as songs, books, and movies; but to what extent can the perception of success become a “self-fulfilling prophecy”? We have explored this question experimentally by artificially inverting the true popularity of songs in an online “music market,” in which 12,207 participants listened to and downloaded songs by unknown bands. We found that most songs experienced self-ful- filling prophecies, in which perceived—but initially false—popularity became real over time. We also found, however, that the inversion was not self-fulfilling for the market as a whole, in part because the very best songs recovered their popularity in the long run. Moreover, the distortion of market information reduced the correlation between appeal and popularity, and led to fewer overall downloads. These results, although partial and speculative, suggest a new approach to the study of cultural markets, and indicate the potential of web-based experiments to explore ... This paper uses detailed weekly data on sales of hardcover fiction books to evaluate the impact of the New York Times bestseller list on sales and product variety. In order to circumvent the obvious problem of simultaneity of sales and bestseller status, the analysis exploits time lags and accidental omissions in the construction of the list. The empirical results indicate that appearing on the list leads to a modest increase in sales for the average book, and that the effect is more dramatic for bestsellers by debut authors. The paper discusses how the additional concentration of demand on top-selling books could lead to a reduction in the privately optimal number of books to publish. However, the data suggest the opposite is true: the market expansion effect of bestseller lists appears to dominate any business stealing from non-bestselling titles.