Cascades and Spreading of Wireless Headphones
https://qz.com/745108/wireless-headphone-sales-just-hit-a-tipping-point/
Ian Kar discusses the trend of people switching between non-bluetooth and bluetooth headphones within his article on how wireless headphones has taken over traditional headphones in sales. Within his graph titled “Market share for headphone sales in the US”, he shows the decreasing, linear trend in sales of traditional, non-bluetooth headphones and increasing, linear trend in sales of wireless, bluetooth headphones. Within a few months into the year 2016, the graphs of non-bluetooth and bluetooth headphone sales cross, depicting the popularity of wireless headphones.
It’s interesting how the graphs of headphones sales have a linear trend, rather than exponential. I initially expected exponential growth because the trend would spread from a person to their friends, and then to their friends’ friends, and so forth, and also because bluetooth headphones are being favored among new products, which builds upon its value (for instance, Kar mentions how apple eliminated the headphone jack to favor bluetooth technology). However, this coincides with the model of cascades and spreading, where each node only adopts a certain idea if enough of its connections have also adopted it, and that there is some threshold q that defines how many of its connections must adopt the new idea before the node switches to gain a greater payoff. In this case, each “node” represents a person or consumer, and the “new idea” is the notion of buying bluetooth headphones, rather than the traditional, non-bluetooth headphone. There must also be some threshold q keeping the growth of bluetooth headphones sales linear, and the fact that people often have friend groups prevents the rapid growth of sales between separate friend groups.