Is the Crowd's Wisdom Biased? A Quantitative Analysis of Three Online Communities

  • Authors:
  • Vassilis Kostakos

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • CSE '09 Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering - Volume 04
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Abstract—We present a study of user voting on three websites: Imdb, Amazon and BookCrossings. Here we report on an expert evaluation of the voting mechanisms of each website and a quantitative data analysis of users’ aggregate voting behavior.Our results suggest that the websites with higher barrier to vote introduce a relatively high number of one-off voters, and they appear to attract mostly experts. We also find that one-off voters tend to vote on popular items, while experts mostly vote for obscure, low-rated items.We conclude with design suggestions to address the “wisdom of the crowd” bias.