Social Percolators and Self Organized Criticality

We discuss the influence of information contagion on the dynamics of choices in social networks of heterogeneous buyers. In the case of non-adaptive agents, the dynamics results in either the contagion process being stuck and very few agents actually buying (flops) or in a ‘hit’ where most agents a priori interested in getting the product actually buy it. We also show that when buyers and sellers try to adjust bids and asks the tatonement process does not converge to equilibrium at some intermediate market share and that large amplitude swings are actually observed across the percolation threshold.