Opinion Dynamics in Social Networks A Local Interaction Game.pdfVIP

Opinion Dynamics in Social Networks: A Local Interaction Game with Stubborn Agents Javad Ghaderi and R. Srikant Department of ECE and Coordinated Science Lab., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Abstract—The process by which new ideas, innovations, and neighbors. We study whether an equilibrium can emerge as behaviors spread through a large social network can be thought of a result of such local interactions and how such equilibrium as a networked interaction game: Each agent obtains information possibly depends on the graph structure and initial opinions from certain number of agents in his friendship neighborhood, and adapts his idea or behavior to increase his benefit. In of the agents. In the interaction model, we also incorporate this paper, we are interested in how opinions, about a certain stubbornness of agents with respect to their initial opinions and topic, form in social networks. We model opinions as continuous investigate the dependency of the equilibrium on such stubborn scalars ranging from to with () representing extremely agents. Characterizing the convergence rate to the equilibrium positive(negative) opinion. Each agent has an initial opinion and as a function of graph structure, location of stubborn agents incurs some cost depending on the opinions of his neighbors, his initial opinion, and his stubbornness about his initial opinion. and their levels of stubbornness is another goal of the current Agents iteratively update their opinions based on their own paper. initial opinions and observing the opinions of their neighbors. There has been an interesting line of research trying to The iterative upd