Accounting for cultural spread with an economic SIR model

Laurent Gauthier ()
Additional contact information
Laurent Gauthier: Institut Rhônalpin des Systèmes Complexes

Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, 2025, vol. 59, issue 6, No 21, 5436 pages

Abstract: Abstract The spread of culture has been often paralleled with epidemic contagion, and susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) compartment models have been extensively used in the social sciences to represent social phenomena. However, these models do not endogenously account for the emergence of the particular SIR dynamics. We rely on a simple economic construct where agents decide to acquire or to shed some cultural trait at a market price, and derive SIR-like dynamics for the evolution of the prevalence of the trait. While the resulting dynamics are similar to the standard SIR model, they do not rely on contagion or contact. The similarity between both models stresses the fact that social phenomena that resemble epidemiological patterns may be explainable without resorting to contagion mechanisms.

Keywords: Culture diffusion; Contagion; SIR models; Economic modeling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11135-025-02234-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:qualqt:v:59:y:2025:i:6:d:10.1007_s11135-025-02234-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11135

DOI: 10.1007/s11135-025-02234-3

Access Statistics for this article

Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology is currently edited by Vittorio Capecchi

More articles in Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().