Online retailers may be shooting themselves in the tail — the long tail, that is, according to Kartik Hosanagar , Wharton professor of operations and information management, and Dan Fleder, a Wharton doctoral candidate, in new research on the “recommenders” that many of these retailers use on their websites. Recommenders — perhaps the best known is Amazon’s — tend to drive consumers to concentrate their purchases among popular items rather than allow them to explore and buy whatever piques their curiosity, the two scholars suggest in a working paper titled, “Blockbuster Culture’s Next Rise or Fall: The Impact of Recommender Systems on Sales Diversity.”

Hosanagar and Fleder argue that online recommenders “reinforce the blockbuster nature of media.” And they warn that, by deploying standard designs, online retailers may be recreating the very phenomenon — circumscribed media purchasing choices — that some of them have bragged about helping consumers escape.

If you follow retailing, you know that “the long…