Prevailing Trends Modelled by a Small-World Network

Abstract

We extended a network model of scientific paradigm shifts proposed by Bornholdt et al. (2011) to one of prevailing trends, such as music CDs. A mean-field state-update rule was replaced by a local state-update rule that depends only on nearest neighbors of a small-world network. Then, we used the extended model to establish a connection between the model and theories in social sciences. In particular, we used the ideas of the diffusion of innovations and early adopters introduced by Rogers, and a chasm pointed out by Moore. Finally, we used real commercial data of music CDs. We showed that sales of the music CDs of major and independent labels can be modeled using the original lattice model and our small-world network model, respectively.