It’s time to choose a name for your baby girl. You’ve always liked the name Ava, but your best friend’s one-year-old has the same name and you don’t want to cause any confusion. (In fact, so many new parents have chosen the name that Ava was the third most popular female baby name from 2016 to 2020.) So you choose something else; nothing too wacky, but nothing overtly basic either. Maybe Charlotte?
According to a recent study conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, some iteration of this decision-making process is likely happening across the U.S. every day — dictating trends in music, fashion, food and, of course, baby names. Led by associate professor Russell Golman, the social scientists took an unconventional approach to probing these society-wide shifts in preferences. They created a mathematical model using a framework derived from the field of game theory.
Golman hoped that, by evaluating ...
