Diffusion, peer pressure, and tailed distributions.
We present a general, physically motivated nonlinear and nonlocal advection equation in which the diffusion of interacting random walkers competes with a local drift arising from a kind of peer pressure. We show, using a mapping to an integrable dynamical system, that on varying a parameter the steady-state behavior undergoes a transition from the standard diffusive behavior to a localized stationary state characterized by a tailed distribution. Finally, we show that recent empirical laws on economic growth can be explained as a collective phenomenon due to peer pressure interaction.
Cecconi
Fabio
F
International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) and Istituto Nazionale per la Fisica della Materia (INFM), Trieste-SISSA Unit, Via Beirut 2-4, 34014 Trieste, Italy.
Marsili
Matteo
M
Banavar
Jayanth R
JR
Maritan
Amos
A
D004467:Economics; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011157:Population Dynamics; D012919:Social Behavior