arXiv subjects

Mehdi Moussaïd

Publications and source records attributed to Mehdi Moussaïd.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2017

Ranking with social cues: Integrating online review scores and popularity information

Online marketplaces, search engines, and databases employ aggregated social information to rank their content for users. Two ranking heuristics commonly implemented to order the available options are the average review score and item popularity-that is, the number of users who have experienced an item. These rules, although easy to implement, only partly reflect actual user preferences, as people may assign values to both average scores and popularity and trade off between the two. How do people integrate these two pieces of social information when making choices? We present two experiments in which we asked participants to choose 200 times among options drawn directly from two widely used online venues: Amazon and IMDb. The only information presented to participants was the average score and the number of reviews, which served as a proxy for popularity. We found that most people are willing to settle for items with somewhat lower average scores if they are more popular. Yet, our study uncovered substantial diversity of preferences among participants, which indicates a sizable potential for personalizing ranking schemes that rely on social information.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2017

Diversity of preferences can increase collective welfare in sequential exploration problems

In search engines, online marketplaces and other human-computer interfaces large collectives of individuals sequentially interact with numerous alternatives of varying quality. In these contexts, trial and error (exploration) is crucial for uncovering novel high-quality items or solutions, but entails a high cost for individual users. Self-interested decision makers, are often better off imitating the choices of individuals who have already incurred the costs of exploration. Although imitation makes sense at the individual level, it deprives the group of additional information that could have been gleaned by individual explorers. In this paper we show that in such problems, preference diversity can function as a welfare enhancing mechanism. It leads to a consistent increase in the quality of the consumed alternatives that outweighs the increased cost of search for the users.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2016

Crowd Behaviour during High-Stress Evacuations in an Immersive Virtual Environment

Understanding the collective dynamics of crowd movements during stressful emergency situations is central to reducing the risk of deadly crowd disasters. Yet, their systematic experimental study remains a challenging open problem due to ethical and methodological constraints. In this paper, we demonstrate the viability of shared 3D virtual environments as an experimental platform for conducting crowd experiments with real people. In particular, we show that crowds of real human subjects moving and interacting in an immersive 3D virtual environment exhibit typical patterns of real crowds as observed in real-life crowded situations. These include the manifestation of social conventions and the emergence of self-organized patterns during egress scenarios. High-stress evacuation experiments conducted in this virtual environment reveal movements characterized by mass herding and dangerous overcrowding as they occur in crowd disasters. We describe the behavioral mechanisms at play under such extreme conditions and identify critical zones where overcrowding may occur. Furthermore, we show that herding spontaneously emerges from a density effect without the need to assume an increase of the individual tendency to imitate peers. Our experiments reveal the promise of immersive virtual environments as an ethical, cost-efficient, yet accurate platform for exploring crowd behaviour in high-risk situations with real human subjects.

physics.soc-ph↗