Links for 2009 05 20

  • Social Influence, Binary Decisions and Collective Dynamics by Dunia Lopez-Pintado, D.J.Watts.
    In this paper we address the general question of how social influence determines collective outcomes for large populations of individuals faced with binary decisions. First, we define conditions under which the behavior of individuals making binary decisions can be described in terms of what we call an influence-response function: a one-dimensional function of the (weighted) number of individuals choosing each of the alternatives.
    We demonstrate that, under the assumptions of global and anonymous interactions, general knowledge of the influence-response functions is sufficient to compute equilibrium, and even non-equilibrium, properties of the collective dynamics. By enabling us to treat in a consistent manner classes of decisions that have previously been analyzed, our framework allows us to find similarities between apparently quite different kinds of decision situations, and conversely to identify
    important differences between decisions that would otherwise appear very similar.

  • Leading the Herd Astray: An Experimental Study of Self-fulfilling Prophecies in an Artificial Cultural Market By SALGANIK, WATTS
    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-fulfilling 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. (…) 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 the social psychological origin of other macrosocio-logical phenomena.

  • CiteULike: The Structure of Information Pathways in a Social Communication Network
    by: Kossinets, Kleinberg, Watts
    We study the temporal dynamics of communication using on-line data, including e-mail communication among the faculty and staff of a large university over a two-year period. We formulate a temporal notion of "distance" in the underlying social network by measuring the minimum time required for information to spread from one node to another — a concept that draws on the notion of vector-clocks from the study of distributed computing systems. We find that such temporal measures provide structural insights that are not apparent from analyses of the pure social network topology. The network backbone to be the subgraph consisting of edges on which information has the potential to flow the quickest. We find that the backbone is a sparse graph with a concentration of both highly embedded edges and long-range bridges — a finding that sheds new light on the relationship between tie strength and connectivity in social networks.

  • GuruMine: a Pattern Mining System for Discovering Leaders and Tribes …
    By Yahoo guy. GuruMine, a pattern mining system for the discovery of leaders, i.e., influential users in social networks, and their tribes, i.e., a set of users usually influenced by the same leader over several actions. Actions may be as simple as tagging resources (urls) as in del.icio.us, rating songs as in Yahoo! Music, or movies as in Yahoo! Movies, or users buying gadgets such as cameras, handholds, etc. and blogging a review on the gadgets. The assumption is that actions performed by a user can be seen by their network friends. Users seeing their friends actions are sometimes tempted to perform those actions.

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