Cellular automata for the spreading of technologies in socio-economic systems

TL;DR

This paper presents an agent-based model for technology diffusion in socio-economic systems, highlighting how social interactions and costs influence technological adoption, clustering, and progress.

Contribution

It introduces a novel agent-based framework combining costs and social structure to analyze technology spread and clustering in socio-economic contexts.

Findings

Technological progress depends on advantages of advanced tech and social network structure.

Agents form clusters of similar technological levels with power-law size distribution.

Technology spreading follows extreme order statistics during progress.

Abstract

We introduce an agent-based model for the spreading of technological developments in socio-economic systems where the technology is mainly used for the collaboration/interaction of agents. Agents use products of different technologies to collaborate with each other which induce costs proportional to the difference of technological levels. Additional costs arise when technologies of different providers are used. Agents can adopt technologies and providers of their interacting partners in order to reduce their costs leading to microscopic rearrangements of the system. Analytical calculations and computer simulations revealed that starting from a random configuration of different technological levels a complex time evolution emerges where the spreading of advanced technologies and the overall technological progress of the system are determined by the amount of advantages more advanced technologies provide, and by the structure of the social environment of agents. We show that agents tend to form clusters of identical technological level with a power law size distribution. When technological progress arises, the spreading of technologies in the system can be described by extreme order statistics.