When Sheep Shop: Measuring Herding Effects in Product Ratings with Natural Experiments

This repository contains all the code used to produce the figures and tables for the article When Sheep Shop: Measuring Herding Effects in Product Ratings with Natural Experiments (published at WWW2018). Feel free to use any part of the code or use the data after requesting it (have a look at this file for the request) at the condition that our article is explicitly mentionned, see section Authorization and Reference.

You can also find a blog article preceeding this research on the website of the laboratory DLAB at EPFL, here.

If you have any questions about the code, the data or the results in our article, feel free to contact the authors: Gael Lederrey and Robert West.

Content of the repository

This repository contains all the figures used in this article in the folder figures. You can find the iPython notebooks that have been used to generate these Figures as well as the Tables in the folder code/notebooks. In the folder code/python, you can find some functions that have been used.

We present now all the iPython notebooks in the folder code/notebooks:

• 1-matching.ipynb: This notebook is used to match the data from the parsed data (see this file for more information about the data). This process takes a lot of time, therefore the matched data are also available upon request.
• 2-ratings.ipynb: This notebook is used to plot Figure 3(a) in the article.
• 3-avg_and_std_per_year.ipynb: This notebook is used to plot Figures 3(b) and 3(c) in the article.
• 4-zscores.ipynb: This notebook is used to plot Figures 4(a) and 4(b) in the article.
• 5-lost_rhino.ipynb: This notebook is used to plot Figures 1(a) and 1(b) in the article.
• 6-herding.ipynb: This notebook is used to plot Figures 6(a), 6(b), and 6(c) in the article.
• 7-sanity_checks.ipynb: This notebook is used to plot Figures 5(a), 5(b), and 5(c) in the article.
• 8-tables.ipynb: This notebook gives all the Tables (1 to 6) that you can find in the article.

In addition, we also give Figures 2(a), 2(b), 2(c), and 2(d) that were done on illustrator.

Authorization and Reference

We authorize the use of these datasets and any part of the code at the condition that our article is explicitly mentioned using the following reference: Gael Lederrey and Robert West (2018). When Sheep Shop: Measuring Herding Effects in Product Ratings with Natural Experiments. In Proceedings of The Web Conference (WWW2018).