Peter Dodds
Applied mathematician working on complex systems and social contagion, co-author of the artificial music market experiment.
Who they are
Dodds's field is the mathematics of networks and spreading processes, which is the relevant background for an experiment about how early choices propagate into later ones.
Three-author papers do not report who did what and this page does not guess at a division. The contribution it records is the finding: social influence increased both the inequality and the unpredictability of success, measured across parallel worlds facing identical songs.
Key papers
Salganik, M. J., Dodds, P. S., & Watts, D. J. (2006). Science, 311(5762), 854-856. Second author.
Key ideas
Spreading processes compound small differences, which is the mechanism behind the inequality half of the result. See Cumulative Advantage.
Unpredictability is the harder finding and the more useful one.
Sources
- Salganik, Dodds & Watts (2006), doi:10.1126/science.1121066.