Advanced Search

Innovators, Imitators, and the Evolving Architecture of Social Networks

Contents:

Author Info

  • Joseph E. Harrington, Jr

Abstract

Scientific progress is driven by innovation ?which serves to produce a diversity of ideas ?and imitation through a social network ?which serves to diffuse these ideas. In this paper, we develop an agent-based computational model of this process, in which the agents in the population are heterogeneous in their abilities to innovate and imitate. The model incorporates three primary forces ?the discovery of new ideas by those with superior abilities to innovate, the observation and adoption of these ideas by those with superior abilities to communicate and imitate, and the endogenous development of social networks among heterogeneous agents. The objective is to explore the evolving architecture of social networks and the critical roles that the innovators and imitators play in the process. A central finding is that the emergent social network takes a chainstructure with the innovators as the main source of ideas and the imitators as the connectors between the innovators and the masses. The impact of agent heterogeneity and environmental volatility on the network architecture is also characterized.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
File URL: http://econ.jhu.edu/wp-content/uploads/pdf/papers/wp529harrington.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Bibliographic Info

Paper provided by The Johns Hopkins University,Department of Economics in its series Economics Working Paper Archive with number 529.

Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML (with abstract), plain text (with abstract), BibTeX, RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite), ReDIF
Length:
Date of creation: Sep 2005
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:jhu:papers:529

Contact details of provider:
Postal: 3400 North Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21218
Phone: 410-516-7601
Fax: 410-516-7600
Web page: http://www.econ.jhu.edu
More information through EDIRC

For corrections or technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Boqun Wang).

Related research

Keywords:

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

References

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.:
  1. Myong-Hun Chang & Joseph E Harrington Jr, 2002. "Discovery and Diffusion of Knowledge in an Endogenous Social Network," Economics Working Paper Archive 489, The Johns Hopkins University,Department of Economics.
  2. Colin Camerer & Teck-Hua Ho, 1999. "Experience-weighted Attraction Learning in Normal Form Games," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 67(4), pages 827-874, July.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

Citations

Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
Cited by:
  1. David Goldbaum, 2009. "Follow the Leader: Steady State Analysis of a Dynamic Social Network," Working Paper Series 158, School of Finance and Economics, University of Technology, Sydney.

Lists

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Statistics

Access and download statistics

Corrections

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:jhu:papers:529

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Boqun Wang).

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.