Do the attributes of products matter for success in social network markets?

摘要

In social network markets, the act of consumer choice is governed not just by the set of incentives described by conventional consumer demand theory, but by the choices of others in which an individuals payoff is an explicit function of the actions of others. We observe two key empirical features of outcomes in such markets. First, a highly right-skewed, non-Gaussian distribution of the number of times competing alternatives are selected at a point in time. Second, there is turnover in the rankings of popularity over time. We show that such outcomes can arise either when there is no alternative which exhibits inherent superiority in its attributes, or when agents find it very difficult to discern any differences in quality amongst the alternatives which are available so that it is as if no superiority exists. These features appear to obtain, as a reasonable approximation, in many social network markets.