Modelling Facebook and Outlook event attendance decisions: coordination traps and herding

Julian Inchauspe ()

Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination, 2021, vol. 16, issue 4, No 4, 797-815

Abstract: Abstract Facebook and Outlook have been popular choices for arranging physical attendance of social and business events, with clear advantages emphasised in existing literature, but not free of imperfections. Empirical literature has detected evidence of interdependence among users of these platforms; however, their implications for the possibility of herding traps have been unnoticed. This paper contributes with an original theory that demonstrates that no-attendance or low-attendance traps are a necessary and unavoidable outcome under conditions identified in empirical literature for some events—i.e. events subject to what I call ‘social participation constraints’. The main result is that some potentially desirable meetings are most likely failing to materialise due to the very design of the digital tools. Solutions are proposed to improve their designs to optimise users’ experience. Understanding the mechanism driving herding dynamics and traps that may cause digital tools to fail under interdependence should be of fundamental importance to software designers. This paper offers an accessible, self-contained, compact collection of key results that designers of social media tools and apps can use to enhance users’ experience. It can also be used to enhance business practices that apply to social media environments.

Keywords: Social media; Traps; Coordination; Herding; Apps (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11403-021-00329-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
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:spr:jeicoo:v:16:y:2021:i:4:d:10.1007_s11403-021-00329-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ry/journal/11403/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11403-021-00329-2

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination is currently edited by A. Namatame, Thomas Lux and Shu-Heng Chen

More articles in Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination from Springer, Society for Economic Science with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().