Comments on: reasoning about symbolic choices

By: Luis Celibataire

Luis Celibataire — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:52:30 +0000

There was a study showing that preference in names of the poor people follow with one generation the preferences of rich and famous people. Meaning that the parents will likely choose a name for their child after one of the names of their more wealthy and known contemporans. But I don’t know how rich people name their children.

By: Douglas Galbi

Douglas Galbi — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 01:27:30 +0000

That makes sense to me. But for A to be increasing in popularity very quickly, a lot of parents must actually be naming their children A. So the story has to be a bit more complicated. Particularly kinds of heterogeneity in naming preferences across parents or backward-looking parental estimates of popularity changes could make it work.

By: Andy Havens

Andy Havens — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 21:18:33 +0000

I don’t know if this reflects sophisticated reasoning about enduring appeal or just a “late to the crowd” mentality combined with a pretty specific window for shopping.

Let’s take Name A as the name that is increasing in popularity very quickly, and Name B as one that is growing in popularity, but more slowly. Let’s also say that over the long haul, they’ll both end up equally popular; the same number of kids over a 10 year span will have both names.

One is never more aware of what people are naming their children as when one is expecting. So… during the (let’s say) 6-8 months when you’re actively cultivating name choices, you hear Name A and Name B at some point and think, “Those are neat names.” They’ve entered the consideration pool. Now… if you hear, during the next few months, that 10 people are considering Name A, and only 2 or 3 are considering Name B… well, you don’t want your kid to have the same name as a quarter of his kindergarten class. So you toss Name A.