Cherry Picking: Consumer Choices in Swarm Dynamics, Considering Price and Quality of Goods

Abstract

This paper proposes a further development of the mathematical theory of swarms to behavioral dynamics of social and economic systems, with an application to the modeling of price series in a market. The complexity features of the system are properly described by modeling the asymmetric interactions between buyers and sellers, specifically considering the so-called cherry picking phenomenon, by which not only prices but also qualities are considered when buying a good. Finally, numerical simulations are performed to depict the predictive ability of the model and to show interesting emerging behaviors, as the coordination of buyers and their division in endogenous clusters.

Active particles methods towards modeling in science and society

“…In Section 4 we tackle one of the various aspects of a multiscale vision of living systems and shows how the mathematical theory presented in Section 3 can be developed, according to analogous physical assumptions, within the framework of dynamical systems corresponding to an individual based description. This approach is leads to the so-called mathematical theory of behavioral swarms introduced in [23] and applied to modeling the dynamics of prices in [66].…”