Title: Competition and Selection Among Conventions,
Abstract: In many domains, a latent competition among different conventions determines
which one will come to dominate. One sees such effects in the success of
community jargon, of competing frames in political rhetoric, or of terminology
in technical contexts. These effects have become widespread in the online
domain, where the data offers the potential to study competition among
conventions at a fine-grained level.
In analyzing the dynamics of conventions over time, however, even with
detailed on-line data, one encounters two significant challenges. First, as
conventions evolve, the underlying substance of their meaning tends to change
as well; and such substantive changes confound investigations of social
effects. Second, the selection of a convention takes place through the complex
interactions of individuals within a community, and contention between the
users of competing conventions plays a key role in the convention's evolution.
Any analysis must take place in the presence of these two issues.
In this work we study a setting in which we can cleanly track the competition
among conventions. Our analysis is based on the spread of low-level authoring
conventions in the eprint arXiv over 24 years: by tracking the spread of macros
and other author-defined conventions, we are able to study conventions that
vary even as the underlying meaning remains constant. We find that the
interaction among co-authors over time plays a crucial role in the selection of
them; the distinction between more and less experienced members of the
community, and the distinction between conventions with visible versus
invisible effects, are both central to the underlying processes. Through our
analysis we make predictions at the population level about the ultimate success
of different synonymous conventions over time--and at the individual level
about the outcome of "fights" between people over convention choices.