Disentangling the Effects of Social Signals

Understand

Peer recommendation is a crowdsourcing task that leverages the opinions of many to identify interesting content online, such as news, images, or videos.

• Peer recommendation applications often use social signals, e.g., the number of prior recommendations, to guide people to the more interesting content.
• How people react to social signals, in combination with content quality and its presentation order, determines the outcomes of peer recommendation, i.e., item popularity.
• Using Amazon Mechanical Turk, we experimentally measure the effects of social signals in peer recommendation.