The dynamics of social interaction with agents’ heterogeneity

We analyze a class of binary dynamic models inspired by Brock and Durlauf (2001) on agents’ choices and social interaction. The main feature of our analysis is that agents are heterogeneous, in particular their attitude to interact with the choices of the other agents changes over time endogenously. Although dynamic approaches to the study of models with heterogeneous agents have been already applied in different fields, to our knowledge a complete study of an endogenously varying population of agents has not yet been pursued. As observed in Blume and Durlauf (2003), the main problem is given by the fact that with heterogeneous agents the system may be non reversible. We address these problems, we describe the (possible multiple) steady states of the processes involved, we analyze local and global stability and we discuss the similarities and the differences with respect to the literature. Applications are also provided.