Predictability in an 'Unpredictable' artificial cultural market

Abstract

In social, economic and cultural situations in which the decisions of individuals are influenced directly by the decisions of others, there is an inherently high level of ex ante unpredictability. We examine the extent to which the existence of social influence may, paradoxically, increase the extent to which the choice which eventually emerges as the most popular (the 'winner') can be identified at a very early stage in the process. Once the process of choice has begun, only a very small number of decisions may be necessary to give a reasonable prospect of being able to identify the eventual 'winner'. We illustrate this by an analysis of the music download experiments of Salganik et.al. (2006). We derive a practical rule for early identification of the eventual 'winner'. We validate the rule by applying it to similar data not used in the process of constructing the rule. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.