Citation
Micromotives and Macrobehavior
TL;DR
Individual micromotives produce aggregate macrobehavior
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