How algorithmic popularity bias hinders or promotes quality

Algorithms that favor popular items are used to help us select among many choices, from engaging articles on a social media news feed to songs and books that others have purchased, and from top-raked search engine results to highly-cited scientific papers. The goal of these algorithms is to identify high-quality items such as reliable news, beautiful movies, prestigious information sources, and important discoveries --- in short, high-quality content should rank at the top. Prior work has shown that choosing what is popular may amplify random fluctuations and ultimately lead to sub-optimal rankings. Nonetheless, it is often assumed that recommending what is popular will help high-quality content "bubble up" in practice. Here we identify the conditions in which popularity may be a viable proxy for quality content by studying a simple model of cultural market endowed with an intrinsic notion of quality. A parameter representing the cognitive cost of exploration controls the critical trade-off between quality and popularity. We find a regime of intermediate exploration cost where an optimal balance exists, such that choosing what is popular actually promotes high-quality items to the top. Outside of these limits, however, popularity bias is more likely to hinder quality. These findings clarify the effects of algorithmic popularity bias on quality outcomes, and may inform the design of more principled mechanisms for techno-social cultural markets

Michael Porter's Cluster Theory as a local and regional development tool – the rise and fall of cluster policy in the UK

There has been much written on industrial agglomeration, but it is Michael Porter’s cluster theory, above all others, which has come to dominate local and regional economic development policy. His work has been adopted by the OECD, EU, national and local governments the world over. He and his consultancy group have led reviews of national economic growth strategies in dozens of countries. This rise to prominence, however, is in the face of widespread critique from academics. Cluster theory’s theoretical foundations, its methodological approach and practical implementation have all been unpicked, leading some to label little more than a successful brand riding the wave of new regionalist fashions. Despite libraries of incredibly useful books and articles on clusters, there remains an absence of work which interrogates the translation of clusters into, and then through local and national policy. The aim of this article is to go some way to remedying the situation by examining the influence of Porter’s cluster theory charted through an examin- ation of UK regional development policy in the 1990s and 2000s. To help map the journey of clusters into and through UK economic development policy actor-network theory is adopted as an explanatory framework

Do nations have stomachs? Food drink and imagined community in Africa

This paper takes a rhetorical question posed by Ernest Gellner and reframes it to ask whether a sense of national identity can be forged through everyday acts of consumption – in particular, that of food and drink. The article finds value in Benedict Anderson’s conception of the nation as an imagined community, but argues that it makes little sense to privilege the printed word over other forms of consumption. The article goes on to suggest that there have been significant convergences at the level of consumption, but that not all of this has led to reflection about what it means to be a member of the nation. Some lessons are drawn from literatures about music and dress, following which the attention turns to alcoholic drinks and everyday foodstuffs. The history of the consumption of beer and wine in South Africa is used as a case study for convergence in a least likely scenario. The discussion on food observes that while cuisine is not a matter of debate in many African countries, in some countries, like Ethiopia and Senegal, it is taken very seriously indeed. In South Africa, there are ongoing efforts to posit food preferences as something distinctively South African. Although the braai is often discussed in a lighthearted manner, the promotion of a sense of awareness about what all South Africans share in terms of eating habits also has a more serious side to it.Ausgangspunkt des Beitrags ist eine abgewandelte rhetorische Frage von Ernest Gellner. Gefragt wird, ob alltägliche Akte des Konsums, insbesondere Ess- und Trinkgewohnheiten, zur Identifikation mit der eigenen Nation beitragen. Der Beitrag hält Benedict Andersons Konzeption der Nation als Imagined Community für hilfreich, argumentiert aber, dass es wenig Sinn macht, das gedruckte Wort gegenüber anderen Konsumbereichen besonders hervorzuheben. Der Autor beobachtet im Hinblick auf Konsumgewohnheiten signifikante Konvergenzen, die allerdings nicht immer zur Reflexion über nationale Zusammengehörigkeit führen. Er stellt Beiträge zu Musik und Kleidung vor und wendet sich dann der Bedeutung des Konsums alkoholischer Getränke und alltäglicher Nahrungsmittel zu. Mit einer kursorischen Geschichte des Bier- und Weinkonsums in Südafrika greift er einen auf den ersten Blick besonders unwahrscheinlichen Fall von Konvergenz auf. Die nationale Küche ist in afrikanischen Staaten zumeist kein Gegenstand von Debatten, wird in Ländern wie Äthiopien und Senegal allerdings sehr ernst genommen. Auch in Südafrika gibt es Bemühungen, die Bevorzugung bestimmter Lebensmittel als spezifisch südafrikanisch darzustellen; und auch wenn über die in Südafrika gebräuchliche Variante des Grillens (braai) oft eher scherzhaft gesprochen wird, hat doch die Förderung des Bewusstseins, welche Essgewohnheiten alle Südafrikaner miteinander teilen, auch eine ernstere Seite

Modeling consumer behaviour in the presence of network effects

Consumer choice models are a key component in fields such as Revenue Management and Transport Logistics, where the demands for certain products or services are assumed to follow a particular form, and sellers or market-makers use that information to adjust their strategies accordingly, choosing for example which products to display (assortment problem) or their prices (pricing problem). In the last couple of decades, online markets have taken a lot of relevance, providing a setting where consumers can compare easily different products, before deciding to buy them. More information is now available, and the purchasing decisions not only depend on the quality, prices and availability of the products, but also on what previous consumers think about them (phenomenon commonly known as Network Effects). Hence, in order to create a suitable model for this kind of market, it is relevant to understand how the collective decisions affect the market evolution. In this thesis we consider a particular subset of those online markets, cultural markets, where the products are for example songs, video games or ebooks. This kind of market has the special feature that its products have unlimited supply (since they are just a digital copy), and therefore we can exploit this in our models, to justify assumptions of the asymptotic behaviour of the market. We study some variations of the traditional Multinomial Logit (MNL) model, characterising the behaviour of consumers, where their purchasing decisions are affected by the quality and prices (initially fixed) of the available products, as well as their visibilities in the market interface and the consumption patterns of previous users. We focus particularly on the parameters associated to the network effects, where depending on the strength of the network effects, it is possible to explain: herd behaviours, where an alternative overpowers the rest; as well as more well-distributed settings, where all the alternatives receive enough attention giving a notion of fairness, since higher quality products get a larger market share. Finally, using the model where market shares are distributed according to the quality of the products, we study pricing strategies, where sellers can either collaborate or compete. We analyse the effect of both type of strategies into the choice model

HOW CONSUMER ENTREPRENEURS ATTAIN POLITICAL LEGITIMACY FOR THEIR EMERGING INDUSTRY: THE CASE OF THE ANTI-FRAUDULENCE INDUSTRY IN CHINA

This study examines how consumer entrepreneurs attain political legitimacy for their emerging industry in interaction with the state. An analysis of the discourses made by consumer entrepreneurs who co-created the anti-fraud industry in China between 1994 and 2014 and related discourses made by government officials and journalists was conducted. It finds that, to attain political legitimacy, consumer entrepreneurs in the industry: (1) symbolically integrate the state’s evolving dominant political ideologies, values, and agendas into the frames of their practices and collective identities; and (2) adopt five substantive political alignment strategies to help the state achieve its own goals and reinforce its own political legitimacy by collaborating with the central government, the major agent of the state, and challenging some local governments and government regulation agencies. These findings suggest the possibility that legitimation in the market place is a dialectical political process in certain contexts

A Systematic Literature Review of Localization Strategies of the Global Format Reality TV in China in the Past Decade (2012-2022)

The past few decades have witnessed the popularity of global format reality TV programs in China, paralleled by a growing academic interest in comprehending the process of localizing these format programs. However, the existing literature on the subject comprises diverse and fragmented selected cases, revealing a research gap in terms of a systematic exploration and comprehensive review of the adaptation process of format television programs in China. This study employs a systematic literature review to examine the localization of format reality shows in China over the past decades. It aims to provide practical strategies for format programs to enter the Chinese media market and identify the gaps in this area. The general research question is what strategies have been used to adapt format reality shows in China. A total of 40 articles from CNKI, Google Scholar, and Scopus are selected for qualitative synthesis. The findings indicate that the localization of format reality TV need to incorporate more local elements to enter the Chinese media market due to the cultural differences and the strict regulation from the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television of the People’s Republic of China (SARFT). Further research should investigate the impact of SARFT’s regulations on format programs and the subsequent shift towards local production in China

The speculative turn in IVF: egg freezing and the financialization of fertility

Although egg freezing has received much scholarly attention, the pivotal role of financialisation in the fertility (preservation) sector remains understudied. This article discusses how processes of financialisation have instigated a step-change in the organisation of contemporary US IVF and why egg freezing is at the heart of a wider consolidating trend in the sector. The financialisation of fertility, in this context, references the financial investments in a future in which ever more women freeze their eggs, the role of capital markets in establishing new clinical and commercial infrastructures through which egg freezing becomes accessible and the role of financial products in shaping both the stories and the streamlining of fertility treatments. Together, these developments signal a shift from reproduction to fertility in IVF, in which treatment is not aimed at having a child at present, but rather at the proactive management of a more speculative fertility throughout the life course.Alan Turing Institut