The DOI matches its Crossref record; 20 of the 21 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market
Abstract
Hit songs, books, and movies are many times more successful than average, suggesting that “the best” alternatives are qualitatively different from “the rest”; yet experts routinely fail to predict which products will succeed. We investigated this paradox experimentally, by creating an artificial “music market” in which 14,341 participants downloaded previously unknown songs either with or without knowledge of previous participants' choices. Increasing the strength of social influence increased both inequality and unpredictability of success. Success was also only partly determined by quality: The best songs rarely did poorly, and the worst rarely did well, but any other result was possible.
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“Rosen's economics of superstars [21] shows formally that when the cost of serving additional consumers approaches zero, cultural markets concentrate rewards on a small number of winners regardless of marginal quality differences”
From AI as a Democratizing Force in Indie Game Development (2026) · cites this paper as [21]
In the citing paper
“The market-structure literature of §2.4 predicts what follows: superstar concentration under near-zero marginal cost [21], against which the long-tail alternative [22] is directly testable with the outcome data of Table 13, and choice-abundant markets whose winners are selected by social dynamics rather than quality gradients [23].”
From AI as a Democratizing Force in Indie Game Development (2026) · cites this paper as [21]
In the citing paper
“When considering inequality in heterogeneous populations, there are two distinct aspects to take into account-the dispersion of outcomes and the predictability of outcomes (Lynn, Podolny, & Tao, 2009;Salganik, Dodds, & Watts, 2006).”
From Relative Feedback Increases Disparities in Effort and Performance in Crowdsourcing Contests: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment on Topcoder (2022) · cites this paper as Salganik, Dodds, & Watts, 2006
In the citing paper
“In the case of an inherent quality or virtue, more predictable outcomes imply more equality and fairness (Cook & Hegtvedt, 1983;Jasso, 1983;Salganik et al., 2006).”
From Relative Feedback Increases Disparities in Effort and Performance in Crowdsourcing Contests: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment on Topcoder (2022) · cites this paper as Salganik et al., 2006
In the citing paper
“However, social success and quality of content are only partly correlated (Salganik et al., 2006).”
From Social Drivers and Algorithmic Mechanisms on Digital Media. (2024) · cites this paper as Salganik et al., 2006
In the citing paper
“in a classic experiment, the popularity of all but the very best and worst songs was shown to be more related to stochastic early positive reception by other users than by their inherent quality”
From Stewardship of global collective behavior (2021) · cites this paper as [87]
In the citing paper
“Moreover, the presence of a significant number of neutral individuals holding a random opinion and a low confidence level around these two attractive forces tends to increase the unpredictability of the final outcome [15].”
From Social Influence and the Collective Dynamics of Opinion Formation (2013) · cites this paper as [15]
In the citing paper
“In agreement with previous works [15], the collective outcome appears to be poorly predictable and strongly dependent on the initial conditions [36].”
From Social Influence and the Collective Dynamics of Opinion Formation (2013) · cites this paper as [15]
In the citing paper
“Although there is on average a positive relationship between quality and success [66]”
From Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A New Metric That Uses Citation Rates to Measure Influence at the Article Level (2016) · cites this paper as [66]
In the citing paper
“the ultimate winners in such contests are determined not only by the intrinsic value of the work but also by more intangible social variables [66].”
From Relative Citation Ratio (RCR): A New Metric That Uses Citation Rates to Measure Influence at the Article Level (2016) · cites this paper as [66]
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Reimer, T. O., Hertwig, R., & Sipek, S. (2012) · Oxford University Press eBooks · doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195388435.003.0004 · Cited by 9
Emerging opinion leaders in crowd unfollow crisis: a case study of mobile brands in Twitter
Tang, L., & Ni, Z. (2015) · Pattern Analysis and Applications · doi:10.1007/s10044-014-0445-z · Cited by 6
“Besides, opinion leaders also affect information diffusion [7, 11, 27].”
BackgroundThe Devil's Long Tail: Religious Moderation and Extremism on the Web
O’Hara, K., & Stevens, D. H. (2009) · IEEE Intelligent Systems · doi:10.1109/mis.2009.123 · Cited by 6
“An insight into what is going on is provided by Salganik et al, who looked at music downloads among a large sample of young people [16].”
BackgroundSocial Influence: From Contagion to a Richer Causal Understanding
Liotsiou, D., Moreau, L., & Halford, S. (2016) · Social Informatics · doi:10.1007/978-3-319-47874-6_9 · Cited by 5
“In an online randomized experiment, [41] manage to measure some confounders and obtain a relatively close estimate of the causal effect of aggregate social influence on users’ choices of whether to download a song (focal item).”
BackgroundDecontaminating Taste: Minimizing Nona esthetic Biases in Aesthetic Appraisal
Lundy, D. E. (2016) · Review of Arts and Humanities · doi:10.15640/rah.v5n1a2 · Cited by 6
Zhang, X., Xie, H. L., Zhao, J., et al. (2018) · International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence · doi:10.24963/ijcai.2018/763 · Cited by 6
Externalities in Knowledge Production: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment
Hinnosaar, M., Hinnosaar, T., Kummer, M. E., et al. (2019) · Experimental Economics · doi:10.1007/s10683-021-09730-x · Cited by 6
Kranzbühler, A., Kleijnen, M. H. P., Verlegh, P. W. J., & Teerling, M. L. (2019) · Journal of Medical Internet Research · doi:10.2196/12454 · Cited by 6
“Humans have been found to be especially prone to the influence from a large number of others when it comes to making purchase decisions (eg, [63-65]).”
BackgroundShi, R., Liu, J., & Cappella, J. N. (2021) · Psychology and Health · doi:10.1080/08870446.2021.1893320 · Cited by 6
“Evaluative comments left by prior viewers are found to be able to sway later viewers’ perceptions of the original media products, be they news stories (Lee & Jang, 2010), music (Salganik et al., 2006) or public service announcements (Shi et al., 2014; Walther et al., 2010).”
BackgroundAccuracy-Risk Trade-Off Due to Social Learning in Crowd-Sourced Financial Predictions
Adjodah, D., Leng, Y., Chong, S. K., Krafft, P. M., Moro, E., & Pentland, A. (2021) · Entropy · doi:10.3390/e23070801 · Cited by 8
“For example, increasing the strength of social influence has been shown to increase inequality [39].”
BackgroundPescosolido, B. A. (2021) · Cambridge University Press eBooks · doi:10.1017/9781108878296.025 · Cited by 7
Tindall, D. B., Stoddart, M. C. J., McLevey, J., Jasny, L., Fisher, D. R., Earl, J., & Diani, M. (2021) · Cambridge University Press eBooks · doi:10.1017/9781108878296.054 · Cited by 6
Are Amazon.com Online Review Helpfulness Ratings Biased or Not?
Wan, Y., & Nakayama, M. (2012) · Lecture notes in business information processing · doi:10.1007/978-3-642-29873-8_5 · Cited by 6
Judging a Book by Its Cover: Predicting the Marginal Impact of Title on Reddit Post Popularity
Weissburg, E., Kumar, A., & Dhillon, P. S. (2022) · Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media · doi:10.1609/icwsm.v16i1.19361 · Cited by 11
“Salganik, Dodds, and Watts (2006) explore this phenomenon, concluding that although the best content tends not to be rated poorly by validators and the least popular content tends not to be rated well, for most other posts, validation results were inconclusive.”
BackgroundYoungblood, M., Ozaki, Y., & Savage, P. E. (2023) · Oxford University Press eBooks · doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198869252.013.42 · Cited by 10
“Hits” emerge through self-organized coordination in collective response of free agents
Chakrabarti, A. S., & Sinha, S. (2016) · Physical review. E · doi:10.1103/physreve.94.042302 · Cited by 6
Methods for Information Spread Analysis
Avetisyan, A., Drobyshevskiy, M. D., & Турдаков, Д. (2018) · Proceedings of the Institute for System Programming of RAS · doi:10.15514/ispras-2018-30(6)-11 · Cited by 6
Metadata
- Authors
- Salganik, M. J., Dodds, P. S., & Watts, D. J.
- Affiliations
- Santa Fe Institute (US)
- Corresponding author
- Salganik, Matthew J.
- Dodds, Peter Sheridan
- Watts, Duncan J.
- Venue
- Science
- Published
- 2006-02-10
- Volume
- 311
- Issue
- 5762
- Pages
- 854-856
- ISSN
- 0036-8075 (ISSN-L)
- 1095-9203
- OpenAlex
- W2147453867
- Cited by
- 2,231
- References
- 21
- Citations by year
- 2026: 168 · 2025: 104 · 2024: 102 · 2023: 123 · 2022: 103 · 2021: 231 · 2020: 104 · 2019: 130 · 2018: 131 · 2017: 142 · 2016: 121 · 2015: 123 · 2014: 133 · 2013: 92 · 2012: 122
- FWCI
- 116.70
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Science (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Complex Systems and Time Series Analysis
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Keywords
- cultural market, social influence, music download, product success, consumer choice
- MeSH terms
- Consumer Behavior, Culture, Forecasting, Humans, Interpersonal Relations, Music, Research Design, Social Behavior, Sociology, Internet
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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