Lack of quality discrimination in online information markets.
arXiv: Social and Information Networks(2017)
摘要
Online social networks are marketplaces in which memes compete for our attention. While one would expect the best ideas to prevail, empirical evidence suggests that high-quality information has no competitive advantage. Here we investigate this puzzling lack of discriminative power through an agent-based model that incorporates behavioral limitations in managing a heavy flow of information and measures the relationship between the quality of an idea and its likelihood to become prevalent at the system level. We find that both information overload and limited attention contribute to a degradation in the marketu0027s discriminative power. A good tradeoff between discriminative power and diversity of information is possible according to the model. However, calibration with empirical data characterizing information load and finite attention in real social media reveals a weak correlation between quality and popularity of information. In these realistic conditions, the model provides an interpretation for the high volume of viral misinformation we observe online.
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关键词
online information markets,quality discrimination
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