Stochastic model of agent interaction with opinion leaders

Abstract

We analyze the problem of agents' interactions in a given population. The purpose of this paper is twofold. Starting from a scheme proposed by Galam [Physica A 320, 571 (2003)], which is based on a majority rule to treat the individuals' interactions, we first study some of its relevant properties. Then, we introduce special individuals, called opinion leaders, who play a key role in information spreading in several practical applications. Opinion leaders have the special feature of strongly interfering with the process based on the majority rule, speeding up the diffusion. We consider a model describing agents' interactions, which encompasses Galam's proposal, where opinion leaders are included as special agents. Then we study its specific properties which significantly recast and extend some conclusions drawn for the models given by Galam and Ellero, Fasano, and Sorato [Physica A 388, 3901 (2009)]. Finally, we provide theoretical and numerical results concerning the dynamics of our model, showing that a small percentage of opinion leaders may both accelerate and/or even reverse the overall consensus among all the agents.

Wealth distribution across communities of adaptive financial agents

“…The interaction topology is modelled as a disjoint directed scale-free network, and the graph  is decomposed in up to three disconnected components, the communities, each of which is guided by leaders belonging to the same risk attitude class. Namely, inside each community, we consider emulating the rich dynamics, where the richest agents are stubborn, but influence the other agents, so playing the role of leaders [43]. We choose to consider separated communities so that each follower cannot be influenced by leaders with significantly different risk attitudes.…”

Minority influence in opinion spreading

“…Other contributions have considered agents using influence. For example, in Galam's model Ellero, Fasano, and Sorato (2013) introduce opinion leaders, i.e., agents who always have opinion '+' and are able to persuade all the agents at their table. More generally, when interacting in networks, West, Turalska, and Grigolini (2014) consider committed minority agents keeping an assigned decision independently of the opinion of their neighbors.…”

“…In other words, the majority influence rule remains the same as in the Galam studies, but in our minority modeling the agents representing the minority have the ability to find, when possible, a social gathering where they can influence the others. Furthermore, our strategic minority is more fragile than the opinion leaders considered in Ellero, Fasano, and Sorato (2013) as the latter always have opinion '+' and are able to persuade all the agents at their table.…”

“…As with social space n 3 the absorbing states are consensus either on '−' or '+', this notion has clear implications. Although the killing point can be formalized either as in the original Galam model (Ellero, Fasano, and Sorato 2013) or in the Markov chain formalization (Merlone and Radi 2014), intuitively it can be seen as the intersection between the two dashed lines in Figures 5(a) and 6(a).…”

Large population and long-term behavior of a stochastic binary opinion model

“…The effect of contrarians and independent agents to the group's limiting behavior are discussed in [20]. The presence of leaders is considered in [7,18,15].…”