Songs of a Future Past — An Experimental Study of Online Persuaders

Abstract

In this paper, we present the results of an extensive experimental study on users decisions inside an online setting. In the experiment, participants purchase songs using real money while having enough time to explore them at leisure before buying. In such a set up, surpisingly, common social influence signals such as star ratings, download counts and recommendations had no influence. However, as soon as the exploration was made slightly more cumbersome market inequality appeared. This is an indication that it is decision-making shortcuts, rather then social influence, to trigger distorting market effects.