Title
The gold miner's dilemma: Use of information scent in cooperative and competitive information foraging
Abstract
When searching for new information, do people focus their search on places not-yet discovered by others, or on places that others also focus on? Through a controlled experiment, we investigated heuristic rules that people adopt in social information search, a growing characteristic of how people find information in this hyperconnected world. Three people were connected online to simultaneously search for specific objects in multiple images, under either a cooperative or a competitive setting. They were provided with information about the current number of objects collected and the cumulative time spent on each image. People used such information to decide when to stop the current search and which image to explore next. Further, people paid more attention to others and distribute search efforts when cooperating, compared to when competing against others. Our findings highlight the heuristic rules that people adopt when searching in groups for new information.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1016/j.chb.2020.106352
Computers in Human Behavior
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Collaboration,Competition,Crowdsourcing,Information foraging,Information scent
Journal
109
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0747-5632
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Shinnosuke Nakayama100.34
Samuel Richmond200.34
Oded Nov398463.88
Maurizio Porfiri443747.05