Interesting.
So essentially the curve between demand and rank is nonlinear because there’s so little cost to mass production. There’s no reason why not to make way more of something because there’s a large demand. The things at the top of quality just barely differ, and they win out over those small qualities.
Things that are popular tends to get more popular. “Cumulative advantage”. “Preferential attachment”, all the same thing which means that things that are popular get more popular.
Love the reference to QWERTY vs Dvorak keyboards. I type in Dvorak and I certainly have noticed an increase in my typing speed.
Really cool to examine it experimentally.
Looks like you can manipulate the market, but not everyone can, because users stop trusting it.
Subjective implications:
Unintuitive claims: we can’t really predict everything. The songs in the middle would just scatter randomly when there was an inversion. Markets actually have a lot of influence on the results, (demand has an influence).
You can know everything about an individual’s decision making, and every individual’s decision, but that’s not enough to predict the market because the market influences their decision. It’s not just about the quality.
I think there are a lot of assumptions individual’s make about popularity, which is a driving force to this phenomenon. For one, they assume that popularity is causated with quality, which means they’re going to try to sort by “most popular” when examining a market. This is the case with many individuals, This actually leads to sensitive dependence on initial conditions, an aspect of Chaos Theory. Because people assume
Even Google’s page rank seems to sort by this idea of popularity in “page rank”.