The Firms Markets and Value Cluster's Eminent Visiting Scholar Talk "Diffusion on Networks"

Research Cluster

Speaker:	Prof. Kalyan Chatterjee, Pennsylvania State University
Date:	Thursday 26 May 2016
Time:	11.00
Location:	Matrix Lecture Theatre, Building One

Further details

The spread of innovations has been studied in different scholarly fields in the social sciences for many years. An innovation could be a new process for making steel or a new meaning attached to an existing word like “momentarily” or a new word like “surveill” or a new idea about how to model economic problems (game theory). One characteristic feature of such innovations is that they are not adopted immediately by everyone. Initially the rate of adoption is low; it then picks up and subsequently tails off as the number of possible adopters who have not adopted decreases. We discuss three models in work I have done with others that provides some explanations for this behaviour. The first, involving optimal experimentation with an unknown technology, reproduces the most frequently empirically observed pattern of adoption. The second and third focus on social learning by imitation, a form of “cultural evolution”; in one, the agents are boundedly rational and in the second they are fully strategic decision-makers.