The Few-Get-Richer: A Surprising Consequence of Popularity-Based Rankings

Vicenç Gómez, Gaël Le Mens and Fabrizio Germano

No 1073, Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics

Abstract: Ranking algorithms play a crucial role in online platforms ranging from search engines to recommender systems. In this paper, we identify a surprising consequence of popularity-based rankings: the fewer the items reporting a given signal, the higher the share of the overall traffic they collectively attract. This few-get-richer effect emerges in settings where there are few distinct classes of items (e.g., left-leaning news sources versus right-leaning news sources), and items are ranked based on their popularity. We demonstrate analytically that the few-get-richer effect emerges when people tend to click on top-ranked items and have heterogeneous preferences for the classes of items. Using simulations, we analyze how the strength of the effect changes with assumptions about the setting and human behavior. We also test our predictions experimentally in an online experiment with human participants. Our findings have important implications to understand the spread of misinformation.

Keywords: experiment; ranking algorithm; misinformation; fake news; search engine; Internet; few-get-richer (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-ict
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://bw.bse.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/1073-file.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The few-get-richer: a surprising consequence of popularity-based rankings (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bge:wpaper:1073

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Barcelona School of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bruno Guallar ().