Collective states in social systems with interacting learning agents

Abstract

We consider a social system of interacting heterogeneous agents with learning abilities, a model close to Random Field Ising Models, where the random field corresponds to the idiosyncratic willingness to pay. Given a fixed price, agents decide repeatedly whether to buy or not a unit of a good, so as to maximize their expected utilities. We show that the equilibrium reached by the system depends on the nature of the information agents use to estimate their expected utilities.