TY - JOUR
T1 - The origins of hits
T2 - Cumulative advantage vs. multiplicative returns in cultural markets
AU - Seguin, Charles
N1 - Funding Information:
I thank Alison Appling, Shawn Bauldry, Philip Cohen, Daniel DellaPosta, Brandon Gorman, Omar Lizardo, Andrew Perrin, Kyle Puetz, Ashton Verdery, participants at the Culture and Politics Workshop at UNC Chapel Hill, the Duke Networks Analysis Center Seminar, the Culture and Politics seminar at Penn State, and the editors and anonymous reviewers at Poetics, for their help in various ways on this project.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Elsevier B.V.
PY - 2023/4
Y1 - 2023/4
N2 - The popularity of cultural objects is often distributed as many unpopular “flops” alongside a few “hits.” Hits can be several orders of magnitude more popular than typical objects but are difficult to predict ex-ante. Most explanations focus on cumulative advantage (CA): rich-get-richer processes wherein the success of cultural objects breeds future success, creating high inequality in popularity and decoupling popularity from the properties of objects. I present an additional formal model, multiplicative returns (MR), which assumes that cultural objects are judged as interdependent ensembles of their properties. Like CA, the MR model produces “hit” objects whose popularity is difficult to predict before the fact. I show that the MR model generates popularity distributions consistent with that of US baby girls’ names. I conclude that highly unequal popularity distributions of cultural objects are over-determined: they can arise from MR, CA, or both.
AB - The popularity of cultural objects is often distributed as many unpopular “flops” alongside a few “hits.” Hits can be several orders of magnitude more popular than typical objects but are difficult to predict ex-ante. Most explanations focus on cumulative advantage (CA): rich-get-richer processes wherein the success of cultural objects breeds future success, creating high inequality in popularity and decoupling popularity from the properties of objects. I present an additional formal model, multiplicative returns (MR), which assumes that cultural objects are judged as interdependent ensembles of their properties. Like CA, the MR model produces “hit” objects whose popularity is difficult to predict before the fact. I show that the MR model generates popularity distributions consistent with that of US baby girls’ names. I conclude that highly unequal popularity distributions of cultural objects are over-determined: they can arise from MR, CA, or both.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.poetic.2023.101766
DO - 10.1016/j.poetic.2023.101766
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85150253236
SN - 0304-422X
VL - 97
JO - Poetics
JF - Poetics
M1 - 101766
ER -