Cumulative advantage

It’s an exciting thing to write an inaugural blog posting! This is the official blog of Citizens Market, an online database and community dedicated to promoting socially responsible choices in the marketplace. Soon we’ll have an official (and properly epic) “About Us” section on the homepage. The short version is: we’re a six-person team based in Cambridge, MA who wants to make it easier for consumers to inform themselves about the social and environmental behaviors of corporations.

We’re not sure what this blog will be, exactly; partly news and analysis of developments in responsible consumption, partly updates on our website’s progress, the occasional “what-does-it-all-mean” musing. This, like our platform, will evolve.

Today I’m wondering about the factors that ultimately will determine the success or failure of our project. I recently re-read this article by Duncan Watts about cumulative advantage. Watts and collaborators created online worlds where users could listen to, rate, and download songs by unknown artists. In one of the worlds, users only saw the song names (i.e., they were making independent judgments about the music), but in others users saw how many times the songs had been downloaded by other participants (i.e., they were subject to social influence). Success in the social influence worlds was unpredictable: different songs became big hits in different worlds. There was little correlation between what was popular in the social influence worlds and the ‘objective’ quality of the song, measured by popularity in the independent judgment world.

It’s a great article, and/but the lesson is many things become popular not because they have inherent ‘likeability’, but through a series of arbitrary and chaotic interactions. In these experiments, the hits didn’t even result from mobilizing Malcolm Gladwell’s connectors, mavens, and salesmen; they just emerged from random forces bouncing around in a ‘rich-get-richer’ environment.

Our project depends on getting a critical mass of information and users. But it’s possible that we could do everything right and still not take off.

On the other hand, these cumulative advantage effects seem to emerge in ‘rounds’ of popularity games. But in the real world, what’s a discrete ‘round’? If you’re determined and you keep incorporating feedback and re-launching your project, you increase the odds that people will recognize your awesomeness.

-Isaac