Irrational behavior in the adoption of innovations

Abstract

Classical Economics Theories mostly assume that consumer decisions are made based on rational evaluation according to the utility of a given good. Following this idea, most of the studies on the adoption of technological innovations suppose some kind of rationality behind the individual’s decisions. Here, we choose a different point of view and address the role of non-rational agents in the dynamics of the adoption of innovations in a simple agent-based model. We consider three kind of non-rational agents: oniomaniacs, impulsive buyers, and flickers. Oniomaniacs are people suffering a compulsion to buy novelties, impulsive buyers are persons acting on the impel of the moment, and flickers are agents that impulsively change its adoption status, whatever it is. In our model, such agents coexist with rational individuals who follow adoption rules determined mainly by three elements: the appeal of the novelty, the inertia or resistance to adopt it, and the interaction with other agents. In order to account for societies with different idiosyncrasies, two different distributions of the agent’s inertia have been considered. Moreover, the model incorporates the possibility of repentance and allows two type of rational agents, called mimetic and contrarians. We analyze the effect of non-rational agents in the dynamics of adoption and find that they increase the speed of the adoption process. Moreover, a few impulsive buyers are enough to produce total adoption and neutralize the role of contrarians. We also find that the interplay between flickers and repentants brings new features in the adoption final states, which have a non obvious dependence with the parameters of the model. The non-rational agents considered here produce non-linear effects in the dynamics of adoption, making it more realistic when compared with our previous models.