One swallow makes the summer
One swallow makes the summer is about the positive effect of one initial investment as a head-start at the very beginning. It means, success really does breed success[1]
Overview[edit]
We often see that similar performance get drastically different success or results. Some repeatedly failing and others mostly succeeding. What are the reasons behind? Is it possible to make drastic changes in the end result with a small initial intervention?
In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Arnout van de Rijt was searching for answers to this questions. Than he found an evidence for the success breeds success phenomenon .
Experiments[edit]
Arnout van de Rijt wanted to find an answer to this questions and made four experiment. In this randomized experiments Dr. van de Rijt selected systems which are homogeneous and easy to measure. In each system they gave an initial support to the selected group and analysed the effect of it compared to the intact control group. In each system they found that early success provided upon arbitrarily selected recipients produced significant improvements in subsequent rates of success compared with the control group of non recipients.
Beside of it they also recognized that the marginal effect of an initial support is decreasing. It means larger initial advantages doesn't produce much further differentiation.
Kickstarter[edit]
First Arnout van de Rijt has set an experiment, when he and his colleagues from New York University picked 200 campaigns on Kickstarter, which had no prior funding and had a goal up to 1000€.[2] Than they divided it into the experimental and the control group and funded the first half with 1% or 10% of the final goal. Here they measured two things, the effect of an initial funding and the effect of a smaller(1%) or bigger(10%) initial support. In the control group only 39% of the kickstarter projects get an additional third party funding, while 70% of the projects with the experimental conditions get additional funding. (χ2 = 19.4; P = 0.000) The second part of the experiment - 1% or 10% funding - results, there is a decreasing multiplier of the bigger funding. In other terms there should be some initial support for further third party funding, but the amount of funding has a smaller impact than the existence of it.
Since that this is a widely known phenomenon within the crowdfunding campaign owners, and it's initially planed to fund themselves at the very beginning of the campaigns.
Epinions[edit]
The epinions website was a consumer review site in 2013, when they made his experiments, since than the site disabled the community reviews.[3] On epinions product-review editors was paid based on how their work get rated by other users. In the Experiment Dr. van de Rijt picked 305 unrated product-reviews and gave half of them the highest user rating (very helpful). During the following 14 days 77% of the control group reviews get another "very helpful" rating, and 90% of the treated group get at least one additional "very helpful" rating. This is also a significant difference between the control and the experimental group.(χ2 = 9.54; P = 0.002) This increase of positive ratings didn't came with an increase of negative ratings, so the overall impact is absolutely positive.[4]
Wikipedia:Barnstars[edit]
Third Dr. van de Rijt made an experiment with his student Michael Restivo on Wikipedia, where they wanted to test the positive effect of a recognition on the productivity.[5] Here to test it they selected randomly 200 wikipedia contributors from the top 1% most produtive editors, who have not greceived a barnstar. After that they split the contributors into a control group and an experimental group, booth of 100 editors. The ones in the experimental group get a barnstar, while the control group members didn't. In the control group only 31% of the editors get a barnstar during the observation. In contrast, 40% of the editors who already get a barnstar get an other barnstar during the experiment. It was also a significant difference.(χ2 = 4.72; P = 0.030)[4]
Here on top of the extra recognition from the Wikipedia community, there was another significant increase in the experimental groups productivity. Comparison with the control group shows that receiving a barnstar increases productivity by 60%.[6]
change.org[edit]
On change.org is a petition website, where people and organizations can promote their petitions and collect signatures from the general public. This petitions can be signed online by any supporter. In this experiment Arnout and his team selected 200 early stage petitions - with less than 15 signatures and younger than 14 days - and added 12 signatures to 100 randomly selected petition. After this initial invention they recorded the further signatures for two weeks, it turned out, that the intact control group received on an average of 1.74 signatures, while the experimental group 2.32 additional signature. This is a significant difference - slightly smaller than the previous experiments (z = 1.759; P = 0.079).
Consequences[edit]
As we can see from the study and from all four experiments, an initial small intervention has a significant affect on the later success in many different systems. The question is, how big "small intervention" should we make to maximize our profit or success. We've seen that the multiplicative effect of the extra funding is decreasing as we grow the added fund[4] "The moral of the tale, then, is that success does breed success, but not overwhelmingly."[7]
References[edit]
- ↑ http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0414/280414-success-breeds-success
- ↑ https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21601494-and-science-has-now-proved-it-nothing-succeeds-success
- ↑ "Epinions.com: Read expert reviews on Electronics, Cars, Books, Movies, Music and More". www.epinions.com. Retrieved 2017-06-06.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 http://www.pnas.org/content/111/19/6934.full#sec-1
- ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2012-04-30/Recent_research
- ↑ Restivo, Michael; van de Rijt, Arnout (2012-03-29). "Experimental Study of Informal Rewards in Peer Production". PLoS ONE. 7 (3). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0034358. ISSN 1932-6203. PMC 3315525. PMID 22479610.
- ↑ "Nothing succeeds like success". The Economist. Retrieved 2017-06-06.
External links[edit]
Field experiments of success-breeds-success dynamics - Supporting information kickstarter.com epinions.com
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