In class we have been talking about information cascades. We talked about how cascades are easily started and can be based on false information. Professor Easley also talked about how once a cascade begins people tend to ignore the other, private information that they have been given and just continue the cascade. He used the example the Youtube might not have been the best video sharing website on the web back in the days of its inception, but once it reached a critical mass, it was able to obtain a monoploy on the internet sharing video market. People started to ignore the private information they got about the quality of the other sites and just folowed the trend and just automatically started using Youtube.

The paper below talks about how the authors found that information cascades lead to inferior software products being used. People start to ignore the user reviews more as the product becomes more widely downloaded. However, the paper found that when there are not that many users of a certain product, user reviews actually have a positive effect on the number of downloads. The paper concludes by actually stretching its findings to try to explain why previous studies, that look at the effect user reviews on online product sales, have found mixed results.  The authors explain that one answer very well could be the information cascades that plague the world of software downloads.

networks-and-info-cascades.pdf