Definition
Imitation in economics and the social sciences is the process by which individuals adopt the strategies and practices of others. Typically we imagine that it is success that is imitated rather than failure.
Introduction
Imitation plays a key role in the economic study of competition, innovation, and evolution: the imitation of good ideas serves as a crucial way in which those ideas spread throughout a population. A key theme in the literature is that imitation improves economies and tends to foster efficiency. Imitation, however, bootstraps off of innovation: without new ideas to imitate stagnation is likely to result.
Three Types of Imitation
There are three broad strands of literature in economics studying imitation. The first is the role of imitation in competitive economies. The second is the role of imitation in pushing the process of innovation and growth. The third is the role of imitation in determining long-run outcomes in evolutionary...
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Levine, D.K., Biggs, J.H. (2018). Imitation. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2380-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2380-1
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