Social percolation models

We here relate the occurrence of extreme market shares, close to either 0 o r 100%, in the media industry to a percolation phenomenon across the social network of customers. We further discuss the possibility of observing self -organized criticality when customers and cinema producers adjust their pre ferences and the quality of the produced films according to previous experi ence. Comprehensive computer simulations on square lattices do indeed exhib it self-organized criticality towards the usual percolation threshold and r elated scaling behaviour. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserve d.