Do you follow the crowd?

Another easy and fun article by Ivars Peterson in Math Trek that discusses picking resturants. He tells how three resturants may have a dispropotionate number of people not because of quality but simply because once one resturant starts to gather customers, future customers go to it as well. It's follow the crowd!

A few years ago, a friend of mine told me that one of the features in building shopping malls is to get a store that'll attract people. Once some people are there, others will follow not for the stores, but to be with the crowd. Simple psychology applied to economics.

Read this article and see some mathematics to explain the crowd.