The Obvious Viral Club

This is the penultimate episode in this series on Rational Minds. Why do Australians act Australian, the French act French and Americans act weird? All of these things are examples of localised conformity. Conformity has long been understood as one of the most powerful forces animating social life. But if only a fraction of the population end up doing their homework, the entire population can become vulnerable to bubbles. David Herschelleifer created the informational cascades model in a seminal paper co-authored with Iver Welch and Sootchel Bikchundani in the early 1990s.