Gelastopoulos, Alexandros, Analytis, Pantelis, Le Mens, Gael and Van De Rijt, Arnout
(2024)
The marginal majority effect: when social influence produces lock-in.
arXiv, Toulouse
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Abstract
People are influenced by the choices of others, a phenomenon observed across contexts in the social and behavioral sciences. Social influence can lock in an initial popularity advantage of an option over a higher quality alternative. Yet several experiments designed to enable social influence have found that social systems self-correct rather than lock-in. Here we identify a behavioral phenomenon that makes inferior lock-in possible, which we call the ‘marginal majority effect’: A discontinuous increase in the choice probability of an option as its popularity exceeds that of a competing option. We demonstrate the existence of marginal majority effects in several recent experiments and show that lock-in always occurs when the effect is large enough to offset the quality effect on choice, but rarely otherwise. Our results reconcile conflicting past empirical evidence and connect a behavioral phenomenon to the possibility of social lock-in.
Item Type: | Monograph (Working Paper) |
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Language: | English |
Date: | 22 July 2024 |
Place of Publication: | Toulouse |
Uncontrolled Keywords: | social influence, self-reinforcing process, self-correcting process, marginal majority, lock-in |
Subjects: | B- ECONOMIE ET FINANCE |
Divisions: | TSE-R (Toulouse) |
Institution: | Université Toulouse Capitole |
Site: | UT1 |
Date Deposited: | 14 Mar 2025 12:29 |
Last Modified: | 14 Mar 2025 12:30 |
OAI Identifier: | oai:tse-fr.eu:130403 |
URI: | https://publications.ut-capitole.fr/id/eprint/50585 |