Cascades in capacity constrained agents

Area of Science:

• Social Sciences
• Computational Social Science

Background:

• Contagious phenomena, like music trends, operate in competitive marketplaces.
• These markets often exhibit superstar effects, with a few highly popular items and many unpopular ones.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether capacity constraints, rather than inherent quality, can structurally induce popularity disparities in competitive markets.
• To explore the role of indirect trade-offs in state selection due to limited agent capacity.

Main Methods:

• An agent-based model was developed to simulate agents with a finite capacity for occupying states.
• The model examines how indirect trade-offs, imposed by capacity limits, affect state popularity.

Main Results:

• Increasing the number of available states beyond an agent's capacity significantly increases popularity disparities.
• Capacity constraints are sufficient to create significant differences in popularity, even when states are otherwise identical.

Conclusions:

• Capacity constraints are a potential structural factor contributing to market concentration and the superstar phenomenon.
• These findings suggest that limitations in consumption or adoption capacity can drive market dynamics and inequality.