The dynamics of peer pressure

Abstract

Following the general programme of [2], we investigate the effect of social relationships on the dynamics of preference change within a community. Specifically, we are interested in the phenomenon of 'peer pressure', according to which a person's preferences are changed in response to the preferences of a 'peer group'. This involves both aggregation of preferences, to determine the group's preferences and preference change. We propose a simple model of peer pressure which is still sufficiently non-trivial to display some interesting dynamics, and show how the stable configurations can be expressed logically. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.