Gaël Le Mens

How adoption speed affects the abandonment of cultural tastes.

Products, styles, and social movements often catch on and become popular, but little is known about why such identity-relevant cultural tastes and practices die out. We demonstrate that the velocity of adoption may affect abandonment: Analysis of over 100 years of data on first-name adoption in both France and the United States illustrates that cultural tastes that have been adopted quickly die faster (i.e., are less likely to persist). Mirroring this aggregate pattern, at the individual level, expecting parents are more hesitant to adopt names that recently experienced sharper increases in adoption. Further analysis indicate that these effects are driven by concerns about symbolic value: Fads are perceived negatively, so people avoid identity-relevant items with sharply increasing popularity because they believe that they will be short lived. Ancillary analyses also indicate that, in contrast to conventional wisdom, identity-relevant cultural products that are adopted quickly tend to be less successful overall (i.e., reduced cumulative adoption). These results suggest a potential alternate way to explain diffusion patterns that are traditionally seen as driven by saturation of a pool of potential adopters. They also shed light on one factor that may lead cultural tastes to die out.

Founding Conditions, Learning, and Organizational Life Chances: Age Dependence Revisited

Empirical evidence about the relation between organizational age and failure is mixed, and theoretical explanations are conflicting. We show that a simple model of organizational evolution can explain the main patterns of age dependence and reconcile the apparently conflicting theoretical predictions. In our framework, the predicted pattern of age dependence depends crucially on the quality of organizational performance immediately after founding and its subsequent evolution, which in turn depends on the intensity of competition. In developing our theory, we clarify issues of levels of analysis as well as the relations between organizational fitness, endowment, organizational capital, and the hazard of failure. We show that once organizational learning is considered, founding conditions affect the fate of organizations in ways more complex than previously acknowledged. We illustrate how the predictions of our theory can be tested empirically and evaluate the effect of aging on the mortality hazards of American microbreweries and brewpubs by estimating the parameters of a random walk with time-varying drift. We also make some conjectures about expected patterns in other empirical settings.

Interdependent Sampling and Social Influence

Most explanations of social influence focus on why individuals might want to agree with the opinions or attitudes of others. The authors propose a different explanation that assumes the attitudes of others influence only the activities and objects individuals are exposed to. For example, individuals are likely to be exposed to activities that their friends enjoy. The authors demonstrate that such influence over sampling behavior is sufficient to produce a social influence effect when individuals form attitudes by learning from experience. Even if the experiences of 2 individuals, when they sample an object or event, are independent random variables, their attitudes will become positively correlated if their sampling processes are interdependent. Interdependent sampling of activities thus provides a different explanation of social influence with distinct empirical and theoretical implications.

Organizational Evolution with Fuzzy Technological Boundaries: Tape Drive Producers in the World Market, 1951-1998

We study how tape drive producers respond to the almost continuous emergence of new drive formats across the technologys history. The analysis characterizes the technological formats of tape drives according to their degree of contrast (distinctiveness and visibility) from other formats. We also develop and test arguments about how different types of tape drive manufacturers add and drop the production of formats as a function of the producer density of formats. In the empirical analysis, we find that firms producing formats with high contrast experience a lower rate of mortality. In terms of new format adoption, we find that firms characterized by high levels of contrast are more likely to add formats. Regarding the target of adoption, tape drive producers are more likely to add higher density formats; and these producers are also less likely to drop higher density formats.

Organizational Obsolescence, Drifting Tastes, and Age Dependence in Organizational Life Chances

Various patterns of age dependence in hazards of organizational failure have been documented: liabilities of newness, adolescence, and obsolescence. Prior efforts at providing a unified theory that can accommodate these patterns as special cases have not dealt properly with obsolescence. We tackle this problem by proposing a new model that builds on the most recent unification attempt while integrating the core intuition behind obsolescence: organizations have trouble adapting to drifting environments, which leads to declining performance and, in turn, to decreasing viability. In doing so, we develop a comprehensive representational framework to precisely characterize obsolescence. Our perspective builds on recent theory and research that treats categories as constructions by audiences. We characterize environmental drift as changing audience tastes in a multidimensional feature space and organizational inertia as a decreasing ability for producers to move quickly in that space. This combination creates obsolescence with aging. We then integrate this perspective with prior theory to make novel predictions regarding the age dependence in life chances over the life courses of organizations. We also show how the predictions of our theory can be tested empirically by adapting Levinthals random walk model [Levinthal DA 1991 Random walks and organizational mortality. Admin. Sci. Quart. 363:397-420] to incorporate the possibility of organizational obsolescence.

Information sampling, belief synchronization and collective illusions

We demonstrate that a sampling-based mechanism can offer an alternative explanation for belief synchronization in social groups and the persistence of collective illusions. Our model assumes that people are more likely to sample popular alternatives than unpopular alternatives. We show that this mechanism is sufficient to explain belief synchronization: a strong majority of opinions will likely emerge in favor of one alternative. The reason is that the group is unlikely to move away from a state in which one alternative is very unpopular. If by chance most people come to dislike alternative A, they are all unlikely to sample it again and their opinions of A remain the same. When A is in fact the best alternative, a collective illusion has emerged because people mistakenly believe that a suboptimal alternative is the best. Our model implies that such a collective illusion is persistent. The model thus offers an existence proof that a collective illusion can occur even in settings where people do not infer ...

The Evaluative Advantage of Novel Alternatives An Information-Sampling Account

New products, services, and ideas are often evaluated more favorably than similar but older ones. Although several explanations of this phenomenon have been proposed, we identify an overlooked asymmetry in information about new and old items that emerges when people seek positive experiences and learn about the qualities of (noisy) alternatives by experiencing them. The reason for the asymmetry is that people avoid rechoosing alternatives that previously led to poor outcomes; hence, additional feedback on their qualities is precluded. Negative quality estimates, even when caused by noise, thus tend to persist. This negative bias takes time to develop, and affects old alternatives more strongly than similar but newer alternatives. We analyze a simple learning model and demonstrate the process by which people would tend to evaluate a new alternative more positively than an older alternative with the same payoff distribution. The results from two experimental studies (Ns = 769 and 805) support the predictions of our model.

How Endogenous Crowd Formation Undermines the Wisdom of the Crowd in Online Ratings

People frequently consult average ratings on online recommendation platforms before making consumption decisions. Research on the wisdom-of-the-crowd phenomenon suggests that average ratings provide unbiased quality estimates. Yet we argue that the process by which average ratings are updated creates a systematic bias. In analyses of more than 80 million online ratings, we found that items with high average ratings tend to attract more additional ratings than items with low average ratings. We call this asymmetry in how average ratings are updated endogenous crowd formation. Using computer simulations, we showed that it implies the emergence of a negative bias in average ratings. This bias affects items with few ratings particularly strongly, which leads to ranking mistakes. The average-rating rankings of items with few ratings are worse than their quality rankings. We found evidence for the predicted pattern of biases in an experiment and in analyses of large online-rating data sets.

Information Sampling, Judgment, and the Environment: Application to the Effect of Popularity on Evaluations

If people avoid alternatives they dislike, a negative evaluative bias emerges because errors of under-evaluation are unlikely to be corrected. Prior work that analyzed this mechanism has shown that when the social environment exposes people to avoided alternatives (i.e., it makes them resample them), then evaluations can become systematically more positive. In this paper, we clarify the conditions under which this happens. By analyzing a simple learning model, we show that whether additional exposures induced by the social environment lead to more positive or more negative evaluations depends on how prior evaluations and the social environment interact in driving resampling. We apply these insights to the study of the effect of popularity on evaluations. We show theoretically that increased popularity leads to more positive evaluations when popularity mainly increases the chances of resampling for individuals with low current evaluations. Data on repeat stays at hotels are consistent with this condition: The popularity of a hotel mainly impacts the chances of a repeat stay for individuals with low satisfaction scores. Our results illustrate how a sampling approach can help to explain when and why people tend to like popular alternatives. They also shed new light on the polarization of attitudes across social groups.

Drifting Tastes, Inertia, and Organizational Viability

Why do organizations generally lose their competitive edge as they get older? Recent theory and research on the dynamics of audiences and categories in markets sheds some new light on issues of organizational obsolescence.