“Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?”
By Duncan J. Watts
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=rich%20get%20richer%20phenomenon&st=nyt&scp=2

People tend to make decisions dependent on other’s opinions and previous decisions made. This kind of social interaction does not only create network effect, but also unpredictability of social behaviors. This article from the New York Times starts off by surveying this phenomenon in the entertainment industry, and later expand the issue onto a broader scope.

The article raises the question that “Why professional editors, studio executives and talent managers, many of whom have a lifetime of experience in their businesses, are so bad at predicting which of their many potential projects will make it big?” Since people are social beings, our thoughts can be easily influenced. Thus, whenever one thing becomes slightly popular than another at the right point, it will tend to grow even more popular and expand into huge differences in the long run. This is the rich-get-richer phenomenon. And because of the uncertainties and randomness involved in determining who or what is to become popular, the author argues that if we rerun history with the same social settings, a different winner is very likely to be generated.  

To prove this point, Duncan Watts, along with his co-workers Matthew Salganik and Peter Dodds set up an online music download experiment, very similar to the one mentioned in the text book with two controlled environments: social influenced world and independent condition. They found that the most popular songs in the social-influence world were much more popular than under independent condition. However, the particular songs that became hits were all different across different environments. Thus, they concluded that introducing social-influence into human decision making is the reason for such unpredictability in markets.

This result certainly creates challenges for producers and publishers in our earlier discussion. However, in most cultural markets, no matter how many times we rerun the history, what’s good would always be able to gain popularity, and what’s bad would fail to stand out; since despite all the social influences, the general standards still apply. Therefore, in order to cope with all the uncertainties constantly surrounding us, “we should treat both the predictions and the explanations we are served with the skepticism they deserve”.