A Simple Model of Fads and Cascading Failures on Sparse Switching Networks

The origin of large but rare cascades that are triggered by small initial shocks is a problem that manifests itself in social and natural phenomena as diverse as cultural fads and business innovations (1–5), social movements and revolutions (6–8), and even cascading failures in large infrastructure networks (9–11). Here we present a possible explanation of such cascades in terms of a network of interacting agents whose decisions are determined by the actions of their neighbors. We identify conditions under which the network is susceptible to very rare, but very large cascades and explain why such cascades may be difficult to anticipate in practice.

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