Learning from Viral Content

@article{Dasaratha2022LearningFV,
  title={Learning from Viral Content},
  author={Krishna Dasaratha and Kevin He},
  journal={ArXiv},
  year={2022},
  volume={abs/2210.01267}
}
We study learning on social media with an equilibrium model of users interacting with shared news stories. Rational users arrive sequentially and each observes an original story (i.e., a private signal) and a sample of predecessors’ stories in a news feed, then decides which stories to share. The observed sample of stories depends on what predecessors share as well as the sampling algorithm, which represents a design choice of the platform. We focus on how much the algorithm relies on virality… 
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