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)
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
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