ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a model designed to isolate the effects of this informational feedback on the market-share allocation process, at least with respect to a particular kind of choice problem and a particular underlying social structure. It focuses on some subtle and surprising ways in which agent characteristics and connectivity structure affect the market-shares of the competing products. The chapter describes two examples of properties that seem desirable at the individual level, but which turn out to have undesirable effects at the aggregate level: what is good for each is, in a certain sense, bad for all. It shows that giving agents access to more information does not necessarily lead to a better outcome at the aggregate level: increasing the number of informants for each agent can decrease the proportion of agents that end up adopting the better product. The chapter compares two different procedures for integrating data obtained from informants into a choice between the two products.
