No Need for Speed: Modeling Trend Adoption in a Heterogeneous Population

The speed of social and technological changes is constantly increasing. Change is a pre-requisite for economic development but this increasing speed carries additional costs that may largely affect the ability of the social systems to adopt them. While the financial costs constitute a limit to adoption, the psychological and social costs may also profoundly change the adoption potential. In an agent-based model of a heterogeneous population of adopters we explore the consequences of increasing the speed of novelty introduction on their satisfaction and the degree to which new trends may permeate the system. We show that introduction speed has a diametrically different impact on different adopter groups: opinion leaders are most satisfied when the mainstream individuals are least content and vice versa. Moreover, introduction speed profoundly affects the ability of trends to penetrate the system — the lower the introduction speed, the higher the level of penetration of the social system. With high speed of introduction, only a small fraction of the most attractive novelties is able to permeate the system. In sum, these results show that both the wellbeing of the social system as well as its capacity to adopt novelties are dependent on the speed of change.