You really should read the actual paper--it is only 5 pages long--but it does get into statistical analysis. Ignore the formulas and just focus on the text.In such different domains as statistical physics and spin glasses, neurosciences, social science, economics and finance, large ensemble of interacting individuals taking their decisions either in accordance (mainstream) or against (hipsters) the majority are ubiquitous. Yet, trying hard to be different often ends up in hipsters consistently taking the same decisions, in other words all looking alike. We resolve this apparent paradox studying a canonical model of statistical physics, enriched by incorporating the delays necessary for information to be communicated. We show a generic phase transition in the system: when hipsters are too slow in detecting the trends, they will keep making the same choices and therefore remain correlated as time goes by, while their trend evolves in time as a periodic function. This is true as long as the majority of the population is made of hipsters. Otherwise, hipsters will be, again, largely aligned, towards a constant direction which is imposed by the mainstream choices. Beyond the choice of the best suit to wear this winter, this study may have important implications in understanding dynamics of inhibitory networks of the brain or investment strategies finance, or the understanding of emergent dynamics in social science, domains in which delays of communication and the geometry of the systems are prominent.
Let me jump down to the general conclusion paragraph.
Fascinating stuff, and applicable to any area of endeavor where people are trying to make decisions based on information which arrives at a delay to them.We therefore showed that, in contrast to cooperative systems, populations of individuals that take decision in opposition to the majority undergo phase transitions to oscillatory synchronized states if we take into account the delays in the communication between these individuals. This study opens the way to the understanding of synchronization and correlations in other statistical models, such as those developed in finance, in which case speculators may make profit when taking decisions in opposition to the majority in stock exchange. This problem has been the subject of intensive researches around the so-called minority games (see the book [16] presenting motivations and models), which our system is a particular case of. The analysis of the relatively simple model allowed to go very far in the understanding of the concurrent role of noise, delays and proportions of hipsters and mainstream individuals in this emergence of synchronization among hipsters. Interestingly, synchronization may depend on the precise shape of the distribution of the delays: for synchronization to emerge, one needs both sufficiently long delays and sufficient coherence (small standard deviation of the delays). This yielded the unexpected phenomenon that synchronization among hipsters depends on the distribution, in space, of each individuals, when the delays are function of the distance between two individuals. Along the way, we uncovered several points that are well worth studying in depth. For instance, the behavior of a system with an equal proportion of hipsters and mainstreams appears to be a singular phase transition in which the whole population tends to randomly switch between different trends, and would be very interesting to further characterize.
