Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?

This weekend’s New York Times Magazine has an article from Duncan Watts on the topic of network effects. The article covers many of the topics that we have covered in class, including the “rich get richer” effect and the MusicLab experiment. Watts draws from examples such as Harry Potter and Madonna in his magazine piece, and he uses language that will hopefully be more approachable to the layman.

However, those in INFO 204 have already had exposure to some of these topics, so you can read between the lines to see what Watts is implying. For example, take this excerpt.

In our artificial market, therefore, social influence played as large a role in determining the market share of successful songs as differences in quality. It’s a simple result to state, but it has a surprisingly deep consequence. Because the long-run success of a song depends so sensitively on the decisions of a few early-arriving individuals, whose choices are subsequently amplified and eventually locked in by the cumulative-advantage process, and because the particular individuals who play this important role are chosen randomly and may make different decisions from one moment to the next, the resulting unpredictably is inherent to the nature of the market. It cannot be eliminated either by accumulating more information — about people or songs — or by developing fancier prediction algorithms, any more than you can repeatedly roll sixes no matter how carefully you try to throw the die.

The few “early arriving individuals” strongly parallels the information cascade example that we have covered repeated in class. The start of the information cascade also causes future individuals to be “locked in by the cumulative-advantage process”.

For those that attend class regularly, this article offers just a new description of a subject that you already understand. For those new to this blog (or those skipping class), Watts offers a succinct description of many of the topics we have covered in the last three weeks.