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Evolving social influence in large populations

Bentley, R.A.; Ormerod, P.; Batty, M.

Authors

R.A. Bentley

P. Ormerod

M. Batty



Abstract

Darwinian studies of collective human behaviour, which deal fluently with change and are grounded in the details of social influence among individuals, have much to offer “social” models from the physical sciences which have elegant statistical regularities. Although Darwinian evolution is often associated with selection and adaptation, “neutral” models of drift are equally relevant. Building on established neutral models, we present a general, yet highly parsimonious, stochastic model, which generates an entire family of real-world, right-skew socio-economic distributions, including exponential, winner-take-all, power law tails of varying exponents, and power laws across the whole data. The widely used Barabási and Albert (1999) Science 286: 509-512 “B-A” model of preferential attachment is a special case of this general model. In addition, the model produces the continuous turnover observed empirically within these distributions. Previous preferential attachment models have generated specific distributions with turnover using arbitrary add-on rules, but turnover is an inherent feature of our model. The model also replicates an intriguing new relationship, observed across a range of empirical studies, between the power law exponent and the proportion of data represented in the distribution.

Citation

Bentley, R., Ormerod, P., & Batty, M. (2011). Evolving social influence in large populations. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 65(3), 537-546. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-010-1102-1

Journal Article Type Article
Publication Date Mar 1, 2011
Deposit Date Oct 19, 2011
Journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology
Print ISSN 0340-5443
Electronic ISSN 1432-0762
Publisher Springer
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 65
Issue 3
Pages 537-546
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-010-1102-1
Keywords Neutral theory, Human dynamics, Scaling, Pop music, Markets, Culture evolution, Baby names, Cultural transmission, Power laws, Fashion, Random copying.