期刊名称：Discussion Papers / Department of Economics, University of Essex
出版年度：2004
卷号：2004
出版社：University of Essex
摘要：It has been widely accepted that herding is the consequence of mimetic responses
by agents interacting locally on a communication network. In extant models, this
communication network linking agents, by and large, has been assumed to be
fixed. In this paper we allow it to evolve endogenously by enabling agents to
adaptively modify the weights of their links to their neighbours by reinforcing
‘good’ advisors and breaking away from ‘bad’ advisors with the latter being
replaced randomly from the remaining agents. The resulting network not only
allows for herding of agents, but crucially exhibits realistic properties of
socio-economic networks that are otherwise difficult to replicate: high
clustering, short average path length and a small number of highly connected
agents, called "gurus". These properties are now well understood to characterize
‘small world networks’ of Watts and Strogatz (1998).
