| Open innovation platforms are swiftly developing the capability to capture and display collective preference from the diverse opinions of online participants. Corporate "open innovation" communities, like Dell Idea Storm, have encouraged thousands of participants to submit and vote on ideas, but anonymous voting can lead to erratic and unproductive conflict between the community and the corporation. As the identity of participants in these systems becomes less salient, identifying individual preferences within the collective becomes increasingly difficult for other participants, and the ability to lead the collective preference, or to learn from and follow identifiable others, becomes systematically impossible. Thus, there is a practical need to understand how anonymous collective preference evolves, and a theoretical need to explore the behaviors of the anonymous participants who create this preference. Utilizing 19.8 million preferences by 43,136 participants of reddit.com over 2 years, I examined the evolution of anonymous preference and the impact of individual participation patterns in the early formation of this collective preference. This dissertation reveals that, unlike communities where participants can discern and follow the voting patterns of the most active core participants, thereby allowing community owners to make early predictions of the popularity of an artifact based on a small core group's voting behavior, the most active participants are not the main predictors of an artifact's popularity. Instead, it is the large subset of participants who only modestly engage in voting that provide a much better estimation of the eventual popularity of the artifact. |
