It seems quite clear that the new “collaborative economy” is a good example of how advances in Collective Intelligence can add a lot of value through mechanisms like “collective filtering” attenuating the impact of “the Paradox of Choice”. The Basque consultant Julen Iturbe explains it very well in a blog post: As collaborative products and services eliminate scarcity of professional services and can be provided by anyone with a resource (a room at home, a seat in the car…) to spare, we face a hitherto unknown problem: “the offer can overwhelm our capacity to deal with it”, and this is when we really have to talk about getting attention.

I don’t think that these initiatives will die being over bloated and hypertrophic as Julen suggests. This will not happen because abundance automatically tends to create its own selection mechanisms. New P2P intermediaries like Airbnb know this very well. Indeed their differentiation efforts are now centered on two aspects: 1) recruitment, 2) filtering.

However overwhelming the offer, there will always be a way to get on to the “front page” without being dragged down by Schwartz’s paradox. I am a frequent client of Airbnb and my choices are based on the comments of people that have stayed in the rooms I am checking. It may well be that this filtering mechanism is not optimal and doesn’t quite satisfy expectations, but the same is true of the offer of more traditional middlemen such as Booking or Trivago.

Obviously there is no easy solution. I believe that the challenge lies midst metadata and comment/reputation management. The problem of “attention distribution” that is created by abundance cannot be solved by shouting louder, we must improve the mechanisms that help separate the signal from the noise. But what is really interesting is that the problem of choosing a room with Airbnb in Paris is very similar to the problem of scaling as the number of members of a collective. The more people intervening in a dialogue, the greater the risk of it “overwhelming our capacity to deal with it”. Read more ›