Fashion, novelty and optimality: an application from Physics

We apply a physical-based model to describe the clothes fashion market. Every time a new outlet appears on the market, it can invade the market under certain specific conditions. Hence, the old outlet can be completely dominated and disappears. Each creator competes for a finite population of agents. Fashion phenomena are shown to result from a collective phenomenon produced by local individual imitation effects. We assume that, in each step of the imitation process, agents only interact with a subset rather than with the whole set of agents. People are actually more likely to influence (and be influenced by) their close ''neighbors. Accordingly, we discuss which strategy is best fitted for new producers when people are either simply organized into anonymous reference groups or when they are organized in social groups hierarchically ordered. While counterfeits are shown to reinforce the first strategy, creating social leaders can permit to avoid them. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.