Related papers: Dynamics of fashion: The case of given names
An individual's identity in a human society is specified by his or her name. Differently from family names, usually inherited from fathers, a given name for a child is often chosen at the parents' disposal. However, their decision cannot be…
Goods, styles, ideologies are adopted by society through various mechanisms. In particular, adoption driven by innovation is extensively studied by marketing economics. Mathematical models are currently used to forecast the sales of…
In social sciences, there is currently no consensus on the mechanism for cultural evolution. The evolution of first names of newborn babies offers a remarkable example for the researches in the field. Here we perform statistical analyses on…
The frequency distribution of personal given names offers important evidence about the information economy. This paper presents data on the popularity of the most frequent personal given names (first names) in England and Wales over the…
Although cumulative family name distributions in many countries exhibit power-law forms, there also exist counterexamples. The origin of different family name distributions across countries is discussed analytically in the framework of a…
Simulations of the Simmel effect are performed for agents in a scale-free social network. The social hierarchy of an agent is determined by the degree of her node. Particular features, once selected by a highly connected agent, became…
The quantitative description of cultural evolution is a challenging task. The most difficult part of the problem is probably to find the appropriate measurable quantities that can make more quantitative such evasive concepts as, for…
We examine the complete dataset of baby name popularity collected by U.S. Social Security Administration for the last 131 years (1880-2010). The ranked baby name popularity can be fitted empirically by a piecewise function consisting of…
This paper studies the evolution of the distribution of opinions in a population of individuals in which there exist two distinct subgroups of highly-committed, well-connected opinion leaders endowed with a strong convincing power. Each…
A stochastic model for the evolution of a growing population is proposed, in order to explain empirical power-law distributions in the frequency of family names as a function of the family size. Preliminary results show that the predicted…
We consider a model for the evolution of the surnames distribution under a gender-equality measurement presently discussed in the Spanish parliament (the children take the surname of the father or the mother according to alphabetical…
A dynamic memory model is proposed in which an agent ``learns'' a new agent by means of recommendation. The agents can also ``remember'' and ``forget''. The memory size is decreased while the population size is kept constant. ``Fame''…
Popularity bias is a long-standing challenge in recommender systems. Such a bias exerts detrimental impact on both users and item providers, and many efforts have been dedicated to studying and solving such a bias. However, most existing…
We study the dynamics of the adoption of new products by agents with continuous opinions and discrete actions (CODA). The model is such that the refusal in adopting a new idea or product is increasingly weighted by neighbor agents as…
Social trends or fashions are spontaneous collective decisions made by large portions of a community, often without an apparent good reason. The spontaneous formation of trends provides a well documented mechanism for the spread of…
Understanding the factors that impact the popularity dynamics of social media can drive the design of effective information services, besides providing valuable insights to content generators and online advertisers. Taking YouTube as case…
In recent times there has been a surge of interest in seeking out patterns in the aggregate behavior of socio-economic systems. One such domain is the emergence of statistical regularities in the evolution of collective choice from…
All over the world, future parents are facing the task of finding a suitable given name for their child. This choice is influenced by different factors, such as the social context, language, cultural background and especially personal…
Popularity dynamics in social media depend on a complex interplay of social influence between users and popularity-based recommendations that are provided by the platforms. In this work, we introduce a discrete-time dynamical system to…
In social tagging systems, the diversity of tag vocabulary and the popularity of such tags continue to increase as they are exposed to selection pressure derived from our cognitive nature and cultural preferences. This is analogous to…