purple motes

An accounting professor has recently produced an insightful paper entitled "Constituting the Academic Performer: The Spectre of Superficiality and Stagnation in Academia." While the paper focuses on academic research in accounting from a North American perspective, it suggests that its argument can be extended geographically and to other social science disciplines:

The present paper should therefore not be conceived of as an idiosyncratic problematization of a single area of research [accounting]; it has broader implications as institutionalized logics and practices in a given area do not develop in a vacuum (Foucault, 1966).[Gendron, p. 2]

The paper identifies the fundamental problem of pressure to perform:

Various writers have argued that we live in an era in which expectations of self and others to perform, and provide public demonstrations of performance, are considerable (e.g., Lyotard, 1979; Porter, 1995). In particular, Lyotard (1979) develops the notion of performativity and notes its growing influence on society. Performativity can be defined as a set of ideas and practices which stress the search for technological optimality via the most efficient input/output ratio.[id. p. 3-4]

Academic literature indicates that pressure to perform is particularly acute in academia because of declines in public funding, increased corporate funding, and increased use of performance measures in promoting academics.[id. p. 11] An ordinary person can easily recognize, through considering even just style, diction, characteristic invocations of authority, that disciplinary processes in academia can enforce superficiality and conformity:

Foucaultian studies, which are now commonly used in the qualitative paradigm of accounting research (Gendron and Baker, 2005), make us aware that representations of identity can gain in influence and spread in a community via disciplinary and self-disciplinary processes as deployed on individuals. ...Through normalization and the detection of "deviants," individuals may be pressured to alter their self in a way that is consistent with a given representation of identity, as conveyed via some discourse(s) in their surrounding environment. [id. pp. 9, 10]

The pressure on deviants in academia does not occur only through pressure to publish in prestigious journals that deeply entrenched academic interests control. Obsession with using knowledge as an instrument of power is pervasive in academic. Academics feel it in their bones. In other words, power-knowledge obsession creates a discursive system of surveillance and real citation gaze that disciplines bodies just like mamma did:

Lyon (2001) argues that surveillance practices have significantly developed throughout society and now pervade all spheres of social life; these practices are not operated by some central watchtower but instead by a heterogeneous and unstable network of agencies. Academia is no exception as the spread of performance measurement, in particular, renders researchers subject to the gaze of a variety of surveillance systems (Wilmott, 1995). ....Operating across a variety of ways which often may seem innocuous or trivial in the context of day-to-day life, performance measurement as a discursive technology has colonized vast segments of academia and increasingly regulates the conduct of researchers. [id. pp. 28, 29]

The result is stagnation in academia and astonishingly superficial work:

While [academic] research articles undeniably have content (which, as noted above, may have decreased to some extent over time in terms of originality), the key point is that they are often considered superficial by audiences which are increasingly stimulated and provided with means to bypass the reading of articles. [id. p. 31]

According to this academic researcher, Internet-based mechanism for sharing intellectual work and discussing ideas and applications offers no escape from pressure to produce boring, worthless, and intellectually pathetic work:

It is worth noting that the logic of performance measurements even extends to the world of non-published papers. ... SSRN [a large, open database of intellectual work] therefore contributes to the construction of researchers and institutions as performers -- but a construction which is close to the domain of hyper-reality (Baudrillard, 1981) in that most of the papers displayed on SSRN are unpublished, working papers. An author can therefore develop a reputation as a high-performer even though the key traditional feature upon which is predicated knowledge production systems (i.e., publication) is not met. [id. pp. 24-5]

The author suggests that association journals should support more "epistemological and methodological diversity" and should publish more articles with even less obvious impact than articles currently being published. The author also advocates that academic researchers spend more time discussing journal publication standards and processes. [id. p. 33] To me, these proposals point to a weak, unimaginative reform agenda. Much more radical change is necessary to save the world from tedium and intellectual collapse.

Reference:

Gendron, Yves, "Constituting the Academic Performer: The Spectre of Superficiality and Stagnation in Academia". European Accounting Review, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1003797

1 Comment

"Once upon a time, the editorial page of the New York Times set the political agenda for the U.S.," began the old man. That sounds like a highly undemocratic fairy tale in this Age of Digg (AD). Today, Google is offering Australian Federal Election tools, Youtube is running You Choose '08, Yahoo is mashing up its own efforts, and the political clout of dailyKos appears to be rapidly approaching that of AARP. A significant share of persons appear to be highly interested in discussing politics with other like-minded persons. They now have much greater capability to do that.

The rise of civilizations in ancient China illustrates the importance of communication. The development of enduring social stratification among lineages living in the same location, the organization of lineages into geographical units and large warrior groups, and the development of writing all emerged in ancient China by the Longshan period 5000 to 4000 years ago. Rather than being a result of developments in productive technology and trade, these developments seem to have been products of the emergence of socially recognized, highly valued communications capabilities.[1]

Kings in ancient China emerged as those persons with special capabilities for communicating with ancestors and spirits. Kings had the right family connections and reputations for merit. More importantly, however, they performed rituals offerings, read oracle bones, and possessed elaborately designed bronze tripods (dings, also transcribed as tings). Dings were expensive and scarce. They embodied animals that, used skillfully, were apparently powerful means for communicating with ancestors and spirits.[2] Persons who sought effective communication with ancestors and spirits had to serve the king.

New findings hint that exclusive communication capabilities may also have been important in the rise of cities in northern Mesopotamia. Tell Brak in northeastern Syria, which eventually became the ancient city of Nagar, developed as a city from about 6200 years ago. A high-density central region developed, but so did "clusters of occupied space interspersed with vacant zones." The total settlement area was nearly twenty times larger than other settlement areas of the time.[3]

Subsequent development expanded outer settlements inward. The researchers who documented these developments observed:

The spatial separation between settlement clusters suggests social distance between discrete subcommunities. ... At Brak, clustering may have resulted from maintenance of social distance by immigrant groups. Existing social mechanisms may not have been able to sustain increased density in a nucleated form.

The researchers suggest that urbanism at Brak was "at least in part the unintended result of the actions of autonomous and nonhierarchically ranked groups."[4]

Tell Brak clearly was a center of trade and industry. The central mound included large industrial structures. One building in the central mound contained "grinding stones, big ovens, basalt pounders, carefully crafted stone and bone tools, flint and obsidian blades, mother-of-pearl inlay, and clay spindle whorls." A structure from about a century later contained piles of obisidian imported from Anatolia, as well as imported jasper, marble, serpentine, and diorite stones.[5]

But Tell Brak was more than just a center of trade and industry. Archaeologists found a "unique stone chalice": "a chalice with a white marble base and black obsidian bowel held together at its seam with bitumen."[6] An excavation in 1937-38 uncovered what's called the "Eye Temple":

The temple, built ca 3500–3300 BCE, was named for the hundreds of small alabaster "eye idol" figurines, which were incorporated into the mortar with which the mudbrick temple was constructed. The building's surfaces were richly decorated with clay cones, copper panels and gold work, in a style comparable to contemporary temples of Sumer. [Wikipedia]

Tell Brak became a highly stratified ritual center in addition to being a center of trade and industry. While the Eye Temple is dated much later than the growth of the city, it may have had significant but yet undiscovered antecedents.

Like the development of civilization in ancient China, the development of Tell Brak may have depended on widespread interest in gaining access to scarce communication capabilities (persons and technologies). Small groups might hear accounts that a person or persons at Tell Brak could communicate with spirits whom members of the small group themselves could not contact. They might go to Tell Brak to investigate, settling close enough for observation and investigation, but not so close as to create friction in ordinary communication with the strangers living there.

The combination of shared interests and new communications capabilities seems to have reshaped cities and civilizations. Discussing politics using web-based communications technologies can have a large effect on political authority.

Notes:

[1], Chang, Kwang-Chih (1989) "Ancient China and its anthropological significance," pp. 155-66 in C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky, ed., Archaeological thought in America Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[2] Chang, Kwang-Chih (1983) Art, myth, and ritual: the path to political authority in ancient China. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

[3] Ur, Jason A., Philip Karsgaard, and Joan Oates (2007) "Early Urban Development in the Near East," Science v. 317 (31 Aug) p. 1188.

[4] Id.

[5] Lawler, Andrew (2007) "Murder in Mesopotamia?" Science v. 317 (31 Aug) p. 1165.

[6] Id.

1 Comment

The development of writing gave humans technology for storing knowledge and conveying it across time. But, at least in China, storing and transmitting knowledge doesn't seem to be a good explanation for the earliest writing.

The earliest corpus of Chinese writing is oracle-bone inscriptions from the Late Shang Dynasty. The Shang Dynasty arose about 3500 years ago in the Yellow River valley in the northeastern region of present-day China. To converse with ancestors, spirits, and powers, the dynastic kings and his diviners orally addressed propositions ("charges") to a specially prepared cattle scapula or turtle plastron ("bone"). The bone was then heated, and the king read a response -- "auspicious" or "inauspicious" -- from the heat cracks that appeared in the bone.

In the late Shang Dynasty (about 3050 to 3200 years ago), the divination conversation was systematically recorded. After the divination had occurred, engravers carved unto the bone the date of the divination, sometimes the place if it was unusual, and the charge. Sometimes they also recorded the king's reading, and, less frequently, a record of the actual outcome relevant to the charge. About 150,000 inscribed oracle bones from the Late Shang have been found. Hence late Shang kings had an extensive inscribed-bone record of their conversations with ancestors, spirits, and powers.

The oracle bone inscriptions cover a wide range of concerns. Roughly 7% of inscribed bones concern primarily the weather. Other charges addressed harvests, favor of ancestors, disasters, childbirth, administrative orders, hunting expeditions, and many other topics. In other words, charges are like text on Twitter, but forward-looking:

• "Today it will not rain."
• "(We) will hunt at Wu; going and coming back there will be no disasters."
• "It should be tonight that (we) perform the you-cutting sacrifice and perform an exorcism."
• "There is a sick tooth; it is not Father Yi who is harming (it/him)."
• "The Eastern Lands will receive harvest."
• "Today, yichou, we offer one penned sheep to Ancestory Xin, promise five cattle."
• "It should be Qin whom we order to inspect Lin."
• "It should be Bing whom we order to inspect Lin."
• "If we build a settlement, Di (the High God) will not obstruct (but) approve."
• "Lady Hao's (a consort of the king's) childbearing will be good."
• "(We) pray for Lady Hao to Father Yi (the king's deceased father)."

[all of the above charges are translated and presented in Keightley (2000)]

The charges address immediate, pragmatic concerns. That's not usual for divination. Preserving a record of such divination, however, is unusual.

The purpose of this record seems not to have been to record and transmit knowledge. The reading of the cracks and the actual outcome would have been highly relevant information, but these aspects of the divination often weren't recorded. Moreover, logically complementary propositions were often proposed serially. For example, an oracle bone was addressed with the charge, "It is Shang Jia who is harming the rain," and then, on the same bone, another charge, "It is not Shang Jia who is harming the rain." To avoid inconsistency, these two conversations must have been interpreted in light of each other. In addition, there's no evidence that anyone other than the king determined the readings that the oracle-bone cracks implied. Hence no one other than the king would have an incentive to study the information recorded on the bones. Of course, modern science also implies that studying these records would have no predictive value.

Why then this costly, extensive use of writing? Communication with ancestors, spirits, and powers was highly valued in ancient Chinese culture. Accumulation of inscribed bones documented the extent of the king's communication with ancestors, spirits, and powers. What specifically the bones recorded didn't matter.

Perhaps not having a life for reading lifelogging doesn't matter either. Life is good. For those that find it hard to believe, lifelogging is evidence that they're alive. On the other hand, the social value of that record is likely to be much less than the social value in ancient China of a record of communication with ancestors, spirits, and powers.

Reference:

Keightley, David N. (1999), "The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of the Late Shang Dynasty," in Wm. Theodore De Bary and Richard Lufrano, compilers, Sources of Chinese Tradition, 2'nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press) Ch. 1.

2 Comments

Digital forms and ubiquitous networks are greatly increasing opportunities to circulate authored symbolic works. Digitization projects are creating huge online libraries of digitized books that persons around the world can access at zero incremental cost. Storage prices are dropping so rapidly that one small device will soon be able to store all the music that most persons listen to throughout their lives. Video sharing sites are collecting and distributing large amounts of video across the Internet. Many persons can now easily create a huge library of digital works. How persons respond to vastly expanding access to works will significantly shape the communications industry.

To understand better the circulation of works, consider U.S. public-library users’ book-borrowing behavior since the mid-nineteenth century. Measured relative to the unskilled wage, the dime novels that Irwin Beadle began selling in 1860 were almost five times more expensive than the twenty-five cent paperbacks being sold in 1950. A lower real purchase price for books increased the incentive to purchase rather than borrow. Average time spent reading, according to the best available estimates, fell 50% from 1925 to 1995. Less time spent reading implies less demand for borrowing books.

Other factors probably pushed toward more borrowing. The number of books in print, and the number of books in libraries, increased immensely from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Perhaps such a change encouraged persons to read a larger number of books less thoroughly, and hence favored borrowing books relative to purchasing books. Library users’ travel costs, in time and money, probably fell with improvements in transportation technology since the mid-nineteenth century. Lower travel costs reduce the total cost of borrowing books from a library.

Library book circulation per user has no strong, long-run trend. From 1856 to 1978, library users borrowed from U.S. public libraries about 15 books per user per year. From 1978 to 2004, book circulation per user declined approximately 50%. The growth of audiovisuals circulation, estimated at 25% of total circulation in 2004, accounts for about half of this decline. These figures depend on estimates and disparate samples of libraries with varying circulation and user accounting methods. Nonetheless, these figures are of sufficient quality to suggest that historically established institutions significantly stabilize borrowing behavior.

Users borrowing items from public libraries has plausible connections to a variety of institutions and values. Much of the pleasure from reading comes from discussing a book with friends who have also read the book. The desire to discuss books among friends may constrain the rate at which individuals will read books. At the same time, persons may value going to the library as an activity in itself. Borrowing library items may be in part a by-product of interest in those visits. On the supply side, libraries can counterbalance changing demand for books by shifting the distribution of book collections between popular and less popular works, by changing investments in promoting book borrowing, and by shifting collections from books to audiovisuals.

Media use that is connected to wider scope of behaviors and interests is likely to change more slowly. The shifts in music from vinyl records, to CDs, and then to digital downloads were format changes that required relatively small changes in behavior. Persons who read the same newspaper every morning while using the bathroom, or who watch a half-hour television news program every evening before dinner, have their media use connected to relatively stable patterns of life. Generational changes in patterns of life, rather than changes in relative prices, quality, or features, are more important for such media use. Established institutions, meaning both routine patterns of personal activity and indefinitely chartered organizations, can give media use considerable stability despite major changes in activity incentives and technological possibilities.

Note: Post edited and updated. For sources and data, see Book Circulation Per U.S. Public Library User Since 1856 (also on SSRN).

2 Comments

From: Blog Carnival Message Forwarder
Reply-to: ZZZZ
To: Douglas Galbi
Subject: Fwd: Your Uncle ZZZZ

Your Uncle ZZZZ from YYYY says Hello, would like to get in touch with you. Hope you're doing well. Planning a trip to D.C. in the fall. Would enjoy having you visit me on the farm for a few days.

----------------

From: Douglas Galbi
To: ZZZZ
Subject: Re: Fwd: Your Uncle ZZZZ

Uncle ZZZZ, is that really you, or is this some kind of scam? Here's a test question: what sort of farming did you like best (I still remember what you told me).

------------------

From: Suzanne
To: Douglas Galbi
Subject: Re: Re: Fwd: Your Uncle ZZZZ

Hi Doug I always did vegetable farming. Last time I saw you was at your uncle F---s' 50th wedding anniversary. Am going to Maine for a week to see my grandson Scot. Would like to get in touch with you after. Uncle ZZZZ

------------------

From: Suzanne
To: Douglas Galbi
Subject: Re: Re: Fwd: Your Uncle ZZZZ

I forgot, I grow Lilacs. Looking forward to hearing from you. Uncle ZZZZ

------------------

From: Douglas Galbi
To: Suzanne
Subject: Re: Fwd: Your Uncle ZZZZ

I'm a bit suspicious. About twenty-five years ago, when I visited his farm as a kid, my Uncle ZZZZ told me the kind of farming that he liked best is having the government pay him not to grow stuff. I thought that was a great idea, so I decided that I wanted to be a farmer when I grew up. But I couldn't get land. Still don't have any land.

Hmm, what are phonebooks good for?

---------------------

And that's the last I heard from Suzanne/Uncle ZZZZ. I called my Uncle ZZZZ and left a message about these emails, along with my telephone number. About a week later, Uncle ZZZZ called my brother and told him to tell me that I was welcomed to come and visit him on his farm.

OpenID and other identity technologies cannot solve these sorts of communication problems. Identity is a social problem. Not having communicated with someone for a long time makes misidentification more likely.

Offer Comments

Digital objects typically persist just as long as the virtual world around them. Digital space can double every year or two with advances in digital hardware. Creative users acting in a virtual world can make it a lonely place:

More and more empty houses and castles and the like are lovingly constructed as monuments that few will ever see, and each becomes another wall between users, diluting their presence more and more.

... even if people do manage to find each other, the unbounded complexity of user-created data puts a low ceiling on the number of people who can get together, and thus limits the social dynamics that can emerge.

The upshot is that worlds that depend on user-created content a) suffer from progressively worse dilution of the user population; and b) limit the number of people who can get together when they do find each other. This is not a strong recipe for building effective, long-lasting community. [Terra Nova]

That's much different from the real world:

The importance of geography is also evident across 8,000 years of history in the area now called Japan. The most densely settled regions in the Jomon period (6,000 to 300 BCE) were also the most densely settled regions in 1998. Consider as well the effects of U.S. bombing of Japan in World War II. The nuclear bomb that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima, Japan’s eighth largest city, killed 80,000 persons (20.8% of the city’s population) and destroyed two-thirds of the built up area of the city. Kyoto, Japan’s fifth largest city, was not bombed at all because of its cultural significance. The nuclear destruction of Hiroshima did not have an enduring effect on its attractiveness as a place to live. By 1975, the ratio of Hiroshima’ population to Kyoto’s was about the same as it was before the bombing. The relative attractiveness of places to persons is a remarkably stable aspect of life. [Galbi, 2002; source references there]

In the real world, place is a powerful structure organizing long-lasting communities. Moreover, renewing and preserving the built environment is a central concern in civic life.

While digital spaces organize digital objects in Euclidean neighborhoods (e.g. 184 W. 64'th St, NY), the web organizes digital objects in link neighborhoods. Link neighborhoods are much more flexible and dynamic than Euclidean neighborhoods. Link neighborhoods can evolve as communities of contemporary interest. Search engines can generate new link neighborhoods with regard for activity (modification date) and popularity (page rank or other ranking systems). Digital space, in contrast, is much more cheaply abandoned than re-organized.

Virtual worlds that encourage participants to create digital objects in a Euclidean digital space need to develop better ways to decay built objects and re-organizing space, or they will become lonely places.

Offer Comments

Dogs and cats are probably more important than Second Life to the future of the internet. While major media have hyped Second Life, the number of concurrent online users of Second Life rose above 20,000 for the first time on December, 29, 2006 (oddly, "peak concurrency" reportedly was 25,000 about a week later). The CEO of Linden Lab reported in early January, 2007, that "252,284 people have logged in more than 30 days after their account creation date". That's an upper bound for reasonable definitions of current active users in December, 2006.

Dogster and Catster have been about as successful as Second Life in acquiring active users. Dogster and Catster currently host about 244,000 and 103,000 dog and cat profiles, respectively. Some Dogster and Catster members post multiple profiles: 260,000 members accounted for over 300,000 pet profiles across both Dogster and Catster. Dogster/Catster has made available of variety of additional statistics:

* Over 20.5 million virtual treats given
* There are 7.8 million distinct friend-to-friend connections
* 2.6 million private messages have been sent through the sites
* Over 50,000 pets keep a diary
* We host and server 1.34 million pet photos
* Almost one million forums posts
* Members have created 4,601 affinity groups
[stats reported on Oct. 9, 2006]

Assuming that pets can't write, "over 50,000 pets keep a diary" provides some indication of persons who actively use the service. However, one user may write more than one pet diary. On the other hand, active use can involved many activities other than writing a diary for a pet.

Define active users to be persons who used a service in a given month and who had also used the service more than 30 days prior to their use of the service in the given month. Based on the scanty available data and estimates, I would guess that the number of active users of Second Life and the number of active users of Dogster/Catster were both about 200,000 in December, 2006.

While Dogster/Catster has received relatively little funding, it has a much more propitious field for development than does Second Life. The economic value of Second Life artifacts is rather speculative. In November, 2006, Second Life users cashed out about US$1.1 million. Real-money trade of virtual commodities in all virtual worlds worldwide has been estimated at US$1-3 billion in 2006.

The value of pets is well-established and much larger. At the end of 2001, 36% of U.S. households had a dog, and 32% of households had a cat (see Table 1227). Total spending on pets in the U.S. in 2006 is estimated to have been $38 billion. This spending is not just for necessities:

As it is becoming widely recognized, pet owners' spending is not limited to the basics. [American Pet Products Manufacturers Association]'s National Pet Owners Survey shows 27 percent of dog owners and 13 percent of cat owners buy their pets birthday presents, and 55 percent of dog owners and 37 percent of cat owners buy their pet holiday presents.

Pet-based social networking has real business potential.

Pet-based social networking opens up a new field of creative possibilities. Vinny the Pug may become more famous than a world-famous mountain climber. When the Dogster company blog reported more than 300,000 pet profiles on Dogster and Catster, a commenter wrote:

I was wondering how i can get my 2 year old brindle great dane to be in movies, or magazines, everyone seems even my self that she is a sight to see for being as large of a dog which she is. i would like if you could email me at [address omitted] and give me some insight of how or who would like to give cagney a chance to be a star in the dog world, i do have her site on dogsters here and i hpe you like what you see hope to hear from you soon

At the technological cutting age, SNiFlabs, pioneers in Social Networking in Fur, are developing intelligent pet collars, active leashes, and supporting information services:

Unlike impersonal web services, SNiFlabs lets someone you know and trust make personal connections for you: your dog. Every time you take your dog out for a walk you meet other dogs and other dog owners in your neighborhood. The SNiF® tag takes advantage of this and automatically keeps track of the dogs you have met while out and about. Want to meet new people? You already have something in common with other dog owners. Need to find a good plumber? Want to try a new neighborhood restaurant? Chances are that some one in your dog's social network can make recommendations for you. [see Meeting People]

The future of the internet is as real as pet-based social networking.

2 Comments

Most blog posts did not include any links. A recent study selected 44,362 blogs in a way biased toward finding linked posts. Among all 2.2 million posts in those blogs in August and September of 2005, 98% of the posts had no incoming or outgoing links.[1] This isn't a matter of A-List bloggers exclusivity or blogger masses languishing at the bottom of an influence hierarchy. Most blog post don't even have any outgoing links.

Most bloggers probably blog in a room by themselves, sitting down, typing on a keyboard. Much blogging seems to be about self-expression, like writing in a diary back in the days of secret, personal histories, or about news reporting, like that in traditional media, but with much smaller audiences.

Humans in physical proximity are naturally social. Silence is awkward. Not making eye contact raises suspicion. Persons with nothing in common and no reason to communicate will nonetheless communicate when in physical proximity without a strong alternative focus of attention. Only persons united in an intimate connection are likely to feel comfortable being together in silence when communicating is an authorized possibility. In physical proximity, self-expression and monologues without regard for communication tends to be interpreted as offensive.

Alternative circumstances of communication evoke remarkably little of this natural human sociality. Communicative circumstances are important. Blogging is not like being in a room with other people, even though other persons’ blogs are readily available to a person blogging. Bloggers forlornly lamenting that no one links to them should realize that this does not mean that no one would talk to them.

[1] Jure Leskovec, Mary McGlohon, Christos Faloutsos, Natalie Glance, and Matthew Hurst (2007), "Cascading Behavior in Large Blog Graphs: Patterns and a model," Paper to be presented at SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM 2007), Minneapolis, MI, USA, Apr. 26-28, 2007 (pdf). Blogs were selected through link traversal (see Sec. 4.1 of paper). For share of isolated posts, see Sec. 5.3.

1 Comment

User-to-user recommendations within a large online retailer's recommendation system generated a very small share of sales. With keen business sense (see Netflix) and with praiseworthy regard for the common intellectual good, this retailer allowed some experts to analyze freely a large database of its users’ recommendations and to publish publicly their analysis. The database includes all recommendations that the online retailer’s users made for books, music, and movies from June, 2001 to May 2003.

The online retailer’s recommendation system worked as follows:

Each time a person purchases a book, music, or a movie [DVD or video] he or she is given the option of sending emails recommending the item to friends. The first person to purchase the same item through a referral link in the email gets a 10% discount. When this happens the sender of the recommendation receives a 10% credit on their purchase. [1]

The database includes persons who purchased and made a recommendation, and persons who received a recommendation. The database does not include persons who made a purchase but neither made a recommendation to another person nor received a recommendation from another person.

Purchases that generate recommendations generated few recommendations. Persons who purchased a book and recommended that book made on average 2.0 recommendations per purchased book.[2] Notice that this statistic by definition can be no less than 1: purchases that produced zero recommendations were not recorded in the dataset. To estimate the average number of recommendations per purchase, one needs an estimate of purchases that did not produce a recommendation.

Only a small share of purchases generated a recommendation. Persons who received a recommendation and then purchased the recommended book forwarded the recommendation to another person in about 24% of such purchases.[3] Imitation and concern for social norms have a pervasive and powerful effect on human behavior. The share of purchases in which a person who did not receive a recommendation for a book, but nonetheless purchased it and recommended it is surely less than 24%. That implies that the total number of books purchased per year was higher that 6.1 million, probably much higher. Two plausible figures are 100 million and 30 million.[4] These figures imply shares of purchases that generated a recommendation at 1.4% and 4.9%, respectively.

The overall ratio of recommendations to purchases is much lower than 2. Suppose that the retailer was selling 100 million books per year (the results are qualitatively the same if the retailer was selling only 30 million books per year). Given 2.0 recommendations per book purchase for purchases that produced a recommendation, the overall ratio of recommendations to purchases is 0.028. Making a recommendation created the possibility of a 10% credit for the recommender and a 10% discount for the receiver. Nonetheless, relatively few recommendations were made.

The share of purchases that resulted from user recommendations is miniscule. If the retailer was selling 100 million books per year, then less than a tenth of one percent (0.04%) of purchases followed from users’ recommendations. User social networking through a systematized recommendation system wasn’t a major driver of sales.

Nonetheless, the user recommendation system may have net positive value to the retailer. About 43,000 book purchases per year can plausibly be attributed to user recommendation of books through the retailers’ system.[5] Suppose that the average book price was $30 and the average gross margin was 60%. Then the user recommendation system generated a gross margin of about $800,000 per year. That might be sufficient to make it a profitable feature.

Recommendation systems have major effects on sales. One unsourced report indicated that “35 percent of [Amazon’s] product sales result from recommendations.” Greg Linden, who should know, stated (see comments), “Personalization was responsible for well more than 20% of sales when I left Amazon in 2002.” Automated recommendations probably account for most of the sales through recommendations.

A trade-off between communicative control and potential social effects is an important aspect of social networking. Commentary on the recommendation analysis has largely neglected this issue (for relevant discussion, see here, here, and here, for starters). Being personally responsibility for an online retailer sending a specific purchase offer to a social connection has some social meaning that a potential sender might prefer not to evaluate, and in any case the user cannot change the message sent. The social diffusion of given names, and business successes that arose through social networking, such as Hotmail, Google, MySpace, Youtube, and others, depended on more loosely structured forms of communication.

[1] See Leskovec, Jurij, Lada A. Adamic, and Bernardo A. Huberman, "The Dynamics of Viral Marketing," p. 3.

[2] See Leskovec, Jure, Ajit Singh, and Jon Kleinberg, "Patterns of Influence in a Recommendation Network (pdf), Table 1. The total number of book purchases was 2,859,096 over the 711 day period.

[3] Leskovec et. al., "Dynamics of Viral Marketing," p. 8, Table 3.

[4] See Brynjolfsson, Erik, Michael D. Smith, and Yu (Jeffrey) Hu, ""Consumer Surplus in the Digital Economy: Estimating the Value of Increased Product Variety at Online Booksellers" (pdf), Management Science, v. 49 n. 11 (Nov. 2003) p. 1587, and Sandoval, Greg, "Amazon Losing Ground in Core Area: Books," CNet News.com (Nov. 5, 2001).

[5] Leskovec et. al., "Patterns of Influence," Table 1 (figure annualized).

1 Comment