Market share and quality, or customer satisfaction, go hand in hand. Yet the inference that higher market share indicates higher quality is seldom made. The skepticism is in part fueled by elitism, the association of mass popularity with lower quality, and by cynicism, ascribing market...

Online reputation systems collect, maintain and disseminate reputations as a summary numerical score of past interactions of an establishment with its users. As reputation systems, including web search engines, gain in popularity and become a common method for people to select sought services, a...

Seed fundraising for ventures often takes place by sequentially approaching potential contributors, who make observable decisions. The fundraising succeeds when a target number of investments is reached. Though resembling classic information cascades models, its behavior is radically different,...

Models of social learning feature either binary signals or abstract signal structures often deprived of micro-foundations. Both models are limited when analyzing interim results or performing empirical analysis. We present a method of generating signal structures which are richer than the binary...

A new and fast learning method is described in the context of teaching a program to play chess. A theory of the meaning of a position evaluation is developed, and is then confronted with a large collection of games played by masters or other programs. The program learns by fitting its evaluation...