Agent Communication in Multi-Agent Models of Information Cascades

Understanding how information is transmitted and how an information cascade is formed has many applications both in understanding political and economic behavior and how to best implement economic and public policies. Many papers have shown that information cascades do occur, but they always describe a very basic situation that does not occur often in the real world. To further understand information cascades in more complex conditions, I extended a multi agent simulation model that set out to investigate information cascades in the motion picture industry. I extended the model by allowing agents to speak to other agents before making a movie viewing choice. By allowing agents to communicate, the agents were more effective in choosing high quality movies. How the information cascade presented itself altered with the agent communication. Information cascade occurred in the information the agents transmitted to one another. This resulted in the agents choices focusing their movie choices over a smaller number of movies. This result shows that given a large variety of choices where many are good choices, cascading on a single choice becomes more difficult.