Imitation, proximity, and growth -- A collective swarm dynamics approach

Abstract

This paper is based on the premise that economic growth is driven by an interplay between innovation and imitation in an economy composed of interacting firms operating in a stochastic environment. A novel approach to modeling imitation is presented, based on range-dependent processes that describe how firms consider proximity when imitating peers who are found in a given neighborhood in terms of productivity. Using a particularly tractable approach, we are able to analyze how drastically different economic growth scenarios emerge from different imitation strategies. These emerging scenarios range from diffusive growth where the variance of productivity grows indefinitely, to balanced growth described by a traveling wave with fixed variance. The latter scenario is sustained only when imitation strength among firms exceeds a critical bifurcation threshold.