Social conformity despite individual preferences for distinctiveness

The problem with this sort of analysis is that its trivial (assuming you have time) to turn any common sense argument into a mathematical model. In game theory, it's unlikely that the math is ever going to say "I can't let you do that" [1].

What actually gets published tends to be filtered by its political content. In particular, results with a liberal bias tend to be promoted.

[1] In classical economics, the reverse holds. It's very hard to show that any mechanism is possible under the assumptions of classical economics. Hence the huge number of negative results: (a) Coase theorem, (b) the Modigliani-Miller Theorem (irrelevance of capital structure) and (c) Ricardian equivalence. All these results basically say that if you try to do X (where X is (a) change people's actions that have externalities by assigning property rights, (b) change the value of a firm by changing its capital structure, and (c) change people's actions by government spending), the free market will completely undo your actions and leave the situation unchanged.

Just scanning this, but it looks like a huge attractor for conformity is baked into the model, in eq 3.1. Each agent prefers to be some number of standard deviations from the mean. If conformity increases, the standard deviation shrinks and all preferred distances from a fixed point (the mean) shrink. They note it themselves, that if the entire population starts at the same point, it is an equilibrium, regardless of how the other model variables are initialized. This seems to me entirely artificial.

Explains the Goth coterie from South park :)