Collective states in social systems with interacting learning agents

SEMESHENKO VIKTORIYA; GORDON MIRTA B; NADAL JEAN-PIERRE

PHYSICA A - STATISTICAL AND THEORETICAL PHYSICS

Elsevier

Lugar: France; Año: 2008 vol. 387 p. 4903 - 4916

0378-4371

We study the implications of social interactions and individual learning features on consumer demand in a simple market model. We consider a social system of interacting heterogeneous agents with learning abilities. Given a fixed price, agents repeatedly decide whether or not to buy a unit of a good, so as to maximize their expected utilities. This model is close to Random Field Ising Models, where the random field corresponds to the idiosyncratic willingness to pay. We show that the equilibrium reached depends on the nature of the information agents use to estimate their expected utilities. It may be different from the systems’ Nash equilibria.