trying to learn something new - innovation - is risky
if there is good information (solution that works) it is less risky to imitate
payoff from higher expectations and demanding evidence that something works
uncertainty and rate of environmental change --> innovate
too much innovation --> nobody is learning from anyone else
assume that people have the choice to combine information to make a new behavior, but if this is not sufficiently better, they imitate
there is a risk in learning, but imitation is just copying something that someone else does that works
model shows that population reaches an equilibrium which depends on probability that individuals imitate as a function of the quality of information (standard deviation of the environmental cue) and the probablility that the environment changes. as rate of environmental change decreases, the amount of imitation increases
the population imitates when the information is bad and learns when the information is good
"payoff of learning individuals increases as a the amount of imitation increases because individuals are demanding better evidence before relying on their individual experience and therefore are making fewer errors."
"If imitation is too common, the payoff to imitation declines beause the too-discriminating population does too little learning to track the changing environment."
Boyd, Robert and Peter J. Richerson. 2001. Norms and bounded rationality. pages 281-296. Chapter 16 in "Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox", Gerd Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten, Eds. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.