Social Self-Organization pp 169-184

Part of the Understanding Complex Systems book series (UCS)

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Coordination and Competitive Innovation Spreading in Social Networks

  • Dirk Helbing
Chapter
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Abstract

Competition is one of the most fundamental phenomena in physics, biology and economics. Recent studies of the competition between innovations have highlighted the influence of switching costs and interaction networks, but the problem is still puzzling. We introduce a model that reveals a novel multi-percolation process, which governs the struggle of innovations trying to penetrate a market. We find that innovations thrive as long as they percolate in a population, and one becomes dominant when it is the only one that percolates. Besides offering a theoretical framework to understand the diffusion of competing innovations in social networks, our results are also relevant to model other problems such as opinion formation, political polarization, survival of languages and the spread of health behavior.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012

Authors and Affiliations

  • Dirk Helbing
    • 1
  1. 1.CLU E1ETH ZurichZurichSwitzerland

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