Albert Díaz-Aguilera (Universidad de Barcelona) Alex Arenas (Universitat Rovira i Virgili) Conrad J. Pérez (Universidad de Barcelona) Fernando Vega Redondo (Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas)
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This paper studies a stylized model of local interaction where agents choose from an ever increasing set of vertically ranked actions, e.g. technologies. The driving forces of the model are infrequent upward shifts ("updates"), followed by a rapid process of local imitation ("diffusion"). Our main focus is on the long-run regularities displayed by the long-run distribution of diffusion waves and their implication on the performance of the system. By integrating analytical techniques and numerical simulations, we come to the following two main conclusions: (1) When the penalty for "technological dis-coordination" (the single key parameter of the model) is high enough, the system behaves critically, in the sense customarily used in physics -that is, diffusion waves have their size (or reach) distributed according to power laws. (2) If the performance of the system is evaluated by how fast or cost-efficiently it attains any given technological level, the optimal configuration obtains (in parameter space) close to the frontier of the critical region. There, the system no longer displays synchronized behavior but starts to exhibit persistent and critical long-run heterogeneities. In the heuristic language used by Kauffman (1993), the above two conclusions may be interpreted as an indication that (performance-sensitive) evolutionary forces induce the system to be placed "at the edge of order and chaos".
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Paper provided by Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, S.A. (Ivie) in its series Working Papers. Serie AD with number
2000-30.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Nicholas Economides, 1995.
"The Economics of Networks,"
Working Papers
94-24, New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, Department of Economics, revised Sep 1995.
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