This paper offers an explanation of behavior that puzzled entomologists and economists. Ants, faced with two identical food sources, were observed to concentrate more on one of these but, after a period, they would turn their attention to the other. The same phenomenon has been observed in humans choosing between restaurants. After discussing the nature of foraging and recruitment behavior in ants, a simple model of stochastic recruitment is suggested. This explains the "herding" and "epidemics" described in the literature on financial markets as corresponding to the equilibrium distributio n of a stochastic process rather than to switching between multiple equilibria. Copyright 1993, the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Volume (Year): 108 (1993) Issue (Month): 1 (February) Pages: 137-56 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
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