Social Influence Bias, first-mover advantage, and authorial success

From Whither Cultural Critics? by Adam Waytz.

In a now-famous experiment, Matt Salganik, Peter Dodds, and Duncan Watts empirically demonstrated this effect in an artificial music market. They allowed people to download various songs and randomly assigned people to see the opinions of others who had downloaded these songs. Sometimes a particular song was shown to be well-liked by the masses, and in other versions of the study, that same song was shown to be disliked. Regardless of quality, people evaluated the songs they believed to be well-liked positively and the songs they believed to be disliked negatively.

In more recent work, Lev Muchnik, Sinan Aral, and Sean Taylor have documented this “social influence bias” on a news aggregation website where users can up-vote or down-vote comments posted on various articles. The experimenters initially up-voted some comments and down-voted others at random, and showed that an initial up-vote led to increased subsequent up-voting whereas an initial down-vote increased down-voting. Interestingly, people also “corrected” the down-voted comments by up-voting them more than baseline levels, but even this correction never spurred them to the level of positivity that artificially up-voted comments attained. This experiment again suggests that our evaluations of anything are inevitably influenced by others’ evaluations, and the increasingly public nature of opinion, objectivity is increasingly hard to find.

This is analogous to, and indeed might be the same thing as, the first-movers advantage in business. When circumstances change (consumer preferences, regulation, technology, etc.), the first company in to the new market has a presumed advantage over latecomers in terms of shaping consumer expectations, establishing a position of cost competitiveness, etc. While the occasional reality of first-mover advantage is well documented, it is not necessarily a useful predictor, i.e. there are many first-movers who fail to capitalize on the first-mover advantage and fall prey to second movers.

I wonder if anyone has done any similar study in publishing/literature. I think there is an indisputable feature of the publishing industry in which it is immensely difficult to get published the first time. Once published though, it is several degrees easier to get a second book published than if one were to start all over again. If, for whatever reason, Author A is able to garner kudos from both the public and critics on the publication of their first book, then they are far more likely to succeed in getting a second book published than Author B publishing an equal quality book which did not catch attention the first time.

Part of this is, of course, simple commerce. A publisher is much more likely to chance a second title from an author who was favorably received the first time (to some degree independent of whether their first book was a significant financial success). I do suspect that social influence bias does play a role though in future success. As I approach an unknown book by an unknown author, I am at significant risk of wasting my time and money in discovering that there is a poor match between what I as a reader am seeking and what the author is providing. On the other hand, if I select a title and/or author based on reviews from publications I respect or from word of mouth recommendations from friends and family, then I approach the book with a pre-established expectation that I will enjoy the book. As long as expectations aren't too elevated, I suspect that my post reading assessment of the book will likely be more positive than it otherwise would have been, simply because of social influence bias.

What that suggests to me is that the author/publisher really has two goals when releasing a debut book - 1) financial success via sales, and 2) strong and positive engagement with the reading public. I am guessing those are already well established objectives but the concept of social influence bias suggests that there is a longer term value to the second goal that might not be fully weighted as might warrant.