Micromotives and Macrobehavior
TL;DR
Individual micromotives produce aggregate macrobehavior
Speed Read
0%
300 WPM
-- remaining
Schelling's influential book explored how individual behaviors aggregate into collective patterns, including tipping points and coordination games. His analysis of how small individual choices produce large-scale social patterns provides a theoretical framework for understanding organizational quorum dynamics.
The work demonstrates that understanding individual incentives and thresholds is essential for predicting and engineering collective outcomes.
Key Findings from Schelling (1978)
- Individual micromotives produce aggregate macrobehavior
- Tipping points emerge from threshold dynamics
- Coordination games show how collective outcomes depend on expectations
- Small interventions can shift equilibria when systems are near tipping points