Explaining riots with information cascades.
Los Angeles in 1992 was struck hard by race riots. Rodney King had been beaten by police officers who were concerned about their personal safety. The beating spread viral through news media organizations and shortly after the officers were acquitted of police brutality charges Los Angeles was engulfed in race riots. 30 minutes after the verdict was read more than 300 people gathered outside the courthouse to express dissatisfaction with the verdict. Soon things got violent and thousands of people were involved, followed shortly thereafter with looting and other violence. So what explains the proliferation of riots in such a short period of time?
One answer deals with information cascades and multiple equilibria. Criminals in many cases can be assumed to be rational actors weighing payoffs of rioting (such as looting) against the drawbacks of participating in riots (being arrested, injured, etc). If one person has a higher threshold to start rioting and begins then this takes police resources away from another individual’s actions in a riot, thereby lowering the equilibrium of a second rioter to participate in looting. This effect continually happens lowering the threshold for rioters to enter into looting, continually diffusing police resources over a larger crowd continually lowering the possibility of a new looter being caught. This is an information cascade to participate in looting with the positive feedback.
Source: http://www.voxeu.org/article/riots-and-revolutions-digital-age
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