Popularity signals in trial-offer markets with social influence and position bias

Felipe Maldonado, Pascal Van Hentenryck, Gerardo Berbeglia and Franco Berbeglia

European Journal of Operational Research, 2018, vol. 266, issue 2, 775-793

Abstract: This paper considers trial-offer markets where consumer preferences are modelled by a multinomial logit with social influence and position bias. The social signal for a product is given by its current market share raised to power r (or, equivalently, the number of purchases raised to the power of r). The paper shows that, when r is strictly between 0 and 1, and a static position assignment (e.g., a quality ranking) is used, the market converges to a unique equilibrium where the market shares depend only on product quality, not their initial appeals or the early dynamics. When r is greater than 1, the market becomes unpredictable. In many cases, the market goes to a monopoly for some product: which product becomes a monopoly depends on the initial conditions of the market. These theoretical results are complemented by an agent-based simulation which indicates that convergence is fast when r is between 0 and 1, and that the quality ranking dominates the well-known popularity ranking in terms of market efficiency. These results shed a new light on the role of social influence which is often blamed for unpredictability, inequalities, and inefficiencies in markets. In contrast, this paper shows that, with a proper social signal and position assignment for the products, the market becomes predictable, and inequalities and inefficiencies can be controlled appropriately.

Keywords: System dynamics; Social influence; Stochastic dynamics; Robbins–Monro algorithms; Popularity signals; Ranking policies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ejores:v:266:y:2018:i:2:p:775-793

DOI: 10.1016/j.ejor.2017.10.056

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