Notes on a Social Transmission Model with a Continuum of Agents

This note presents a simple overlapping-generations (OLG) model of the transmission of a trait, such as a culture. Initially, some fraction of agents carry the trait. In each time period, young agents are “born” and are influenced by some older agents. Agents adopt the trait only if at least a certain number of their influencers have the trait. This influence may occur due to rational choice (e.g., because the young agents are playing a coordination game with old agents who are already committed to a strategy), or for some other reason. Our interest is in how the process of social influence unfolds over time, and whether a trait will persist or die out. We characterize the dynamics of the fraction of active agents and relate the analysis to classic results on branching processes and random graphs.