eprintid: 50586 rev_number: 9 eprint_status: archive userid: 1482 importid: 105 dir: disk0/00/05/05/86 datestamp: 2025-03-14 09:13:39 lastmod: 2025-03-14 09:22:36 status_changed: 2025-03-14 09:13:39 type: monograph metadata_visibility: show creators_name: Kontalexi, Marina creators_name: Gelastopoulos, Alexandros creators_name: Analytis, Pantelis creators_id: marinak@sam.sdu.dk creators_id: alexandros.gelastopoulos@iast.fr creators_id: pantelis@sam.sdu.dk creators_idrefppn: 283720182 creators_halaffid: 506116; 1002422 title: Social influence distorts ratings in online interfaces ispublished: pub subjects: subjects_ECO abstract: Theoretical work on sequential choice and large-scale experiments in online ranking and voting systems has demonstrated that social influence can have a drastic impact on social and technological systems. Yet, the effect of social influence on online rating systems remains understudied and the few existing contributions suggest that online ratings would self-correct given enough users. Here, we propose a new framework for studying the effect of social influence on online ratings. We start from the assumption that people are influenced linearly by the observed average rating, but postulate that their propensity to be influenced varies. When the weight people assign to the observed average depends only on their own latent rating, the resulting system is linear, but the long-term rating may substantially deviate from the true mean rating. When the weight people put on the observed average depends on both their own latent rating and the observed average rating, the resulting system is non-linear, and may support multiple equilibria, suggesting that ratings might be path-dependent and deviations dramatic. Our results highlight potential limitations in crowdsourced information aggregation and can inform the design of more robust online rating systems. date: 2025-02 date_type: published publisher: arXiv official_url: http://tse-fr.eu/pub/130405 faculty: tse divisions: tse language: en has_fulltext: FALSE view_date_year: 2025 full_text_status: none monograph_type: working_paper series: arXiv place_of_pub: Toulouse institution: Université Toulouse Capitole department: Toulouse School of economics / Institute For Advanced Study in Toulouse book_title: arXiv oai_identifier: oai:tse-fr.eu:130405 harvester_local_overwrite: pending harvester_local_overwrite: note harvester_local_overwrite: department harvester_local_overwrite: title harvester_local_overwrite: creators_id harvester_local_overwrite: institution harvester_local_overwrite: place_of_pub harvester_local_overwrite: hal_id harvester_local_overwrite: hal_version harvester_local_overwrite: hal_url harvester_local_overwrite: hal_passwd harvester_local_overwrite: creators_idrefppn harvester_local_overwrite: creators_halaffid oai_lastmod: 2025-03-03T09:25:20Z oai_set: tse site: ut1 hal_id: hal-04990829 hal_passwd: k8tmksa1 hal_version: 1 hal_url: https://hal.science/hal-04990829 citation: Kontalexi, Marina, Gelastopoulos, Alexandros and Analytis, Pantelis (2025) Social influence distorts ratings in online interfaces. arXiv, Toulouse