SCIENCE@home

Reinforcement-driven spread of innovations and fads

P. Krapivsky,S. Redner,D. Volovik

Published 2011 in arXiv.org

ABSTRACT

We investigate how social reinforcement drives the spread of permanent innovations and transient fads. We account for social reinforcement by endowing each individual with M + 1 possible awareness states 0, 1, 2,..., M, with state M corresponding to adopting an innovation. An individual with awareness k < M increases to k + 1 by interacting with an adopter. Starting with a single adopter, the time for an initially unaware population that consists of N individuals to adopt an innovation grows as lnN for M = 1, and as N1 − 1/M for M > 1. When individuals can abandon the innovation at rate λ, the population fraction that remains clueless about the fad undergoes a phase transition at a critical rate λc; this transition is second order for M = 1 and first order for M > 1, with macroscopic fluctuations accompanying the latter. The time for the fad to disappear has an intriguing non-monotonic dependence on λ.

PUBLICATION RECORD

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-29 of 29 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

Showing 1-53 of 53 citing papers · Page 1 of 1