The diffusion of innovations in social networks

We consider processes in which new technologies and forms of behavior are transmitted through social and geographic networks Agents adopt behaviors based on a combination of their inherent payoff and their local popularity (the number of neighbors who have adopted them) subject to some random error We characterize the long-run dynamics of such processes in terms of the geometry of the network but without placing a priori restrictions on the network structure When agents interact in sufficiently small close-knit groups the expected waiting time until almost everyone is playing the stochastically stable equilibrium is bounded above independently of the number of agents and independently of the initial state.