Increasing the strength of social influence increased both inequality and unpredictability of success.
Cool. I was going to top-level comment a possible explanation: the more info about other people’s judgements is shared (e.g. via the internet), the stronger misinformation cascades will be, because there are more judgements you observe that are ambiguously either actual data vs. just copying other people’s judgements. With more misinformation cascades, you have more things that are “popular because they’re popular”, and “unpopular because they’re unpopular” (or, stonks and undiscovered good investments).
A different story (or maybe overlapping) is that with more information about people’s judgements, drawing on a larger pool of candidates, the worse the tradeoff becomes to do your own exploration: the cost of mental processing is roughly the same, but just copying everyone else’s opinions gets a much better result (though still maybe significantly worse than is possible).
Cool. I was going to top-level comment a possible explanation: the more info about other people’s judgements is shared (e.g. via the internet), the stronger misinformation cascades will be, because there are more judgements you observe that are ambiguously either actual data vs. just copying other people’s judgements. With more misinformation cascades, you have more things that are “popular because they’re popular”, and “unpopular because they’re unpopular” (or, stonks and undiscovered good investments).
A different story (or maybe overlapping) is that with more information about people’s judgements, drawing on a larger pool of candidates, the worse the tradeoff becomes to do your own exploration: the cost of mental processing is roughly the same, but just copying everyone else’s opinions gets a much better result (though still maybe significantly worse than is possible).