Universal behavior in a generalized model of contagion.

Models of contagion arise broadly in both the biological and the social sciences, with applications ranging from the transmission of infectious diseases to the spread of cultural fads. In this Letter, we introduce a general model of contagion which, by explicitly incorporating memory of past exposures to, for example, an infectious agent, rumor, or new product, includes the main features of existing contagion models and interpolates between them. We obtain exact solutions for a simple version of the model, finding that under general conditions only three classes of collective dynamics exist. Furthermore, we find that, for a given length of memory, the class into which a particular system falls is determined by only two parameters. Our model suggests novel measures for assessing the susceptibility of a population to large contagion events, and also a possible strategy for inhibiting or facilitating them.

• Publication year

  2004

• Venue

  Physical Review Letters

• Publication date

  2004-03-29

• Fields of study

  Biology, Physics, Computer Science, Mathematics, Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1103/PhysRevLett.92.218701arXiv cond-mat/0403699PMID 15245323
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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