Once enough others have chosen, individuals rationally ignore private information and copy, so early accidents lock in.
Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer and Welch's 1992 model. Restaurant queues are the everyday case: after three people join, the fourth ignores their own information, and the queue no longer carries any.
In practice
- A hiring panel that hears the first two interviewers' scores before forming their own converges, and the interview order determined the outcome.
- A consultation where early responses are published shapes the later ones, and the total looks like consensus.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Networks & Collective Behavior
- Essay
- How connections shape what crowds do