The World According to Star Wars

social theorist Duncan Watts (coauthor of the Music Lab papers), think that essentially nothing is destined to succeed. Even the greatest work needs to benefit from social influences.

But sometimes the value of a good depends on how many other people are using it. It isn’t a lot of fun to have a cell phone if you are the only person in the world who has a cell phone. People use Facebook because a lot of people use Facebook. If Facebook hadn’t been able to build a network, it would have failed. Network effects exist when value increases with the number of users.

Behavioral scientists refer to the “planning fallacy,” which means that people typically think that a project will get finished a lot faster than it actually does.