208 research outputs found
Consensus Strikes Back in the Hegselmann-Krause Model of Continuous Opinion Dynamics Under Bounded Confidence
The agent-based bounded confidence model of opinion dynamics of Hegselmann and Krause (2002) is reformulated as an interactive Markov chain. This abstracts from individual agents to a population model which gives a good view on the underlying attractive states of continuous opinion dynamics. We mutually analyse the agent-based model and the interactive Markov chain with a focus on the number of agents and onesided dynamics. Finally, we compute animated bifurcation diagrams that give an overview about the dynamical behavior. They show an interesting phenomenon when we lower the bound of confidence: After the first bifurcation from consensus to polarisation consensus strikes back for a while.Continuous Opinion Dynamics, Bounded Confidence, Interactive Markov Chain, Bifurcation, Number of Agents, Onesided Dynamics
On the Consensus Threshold for the Opinion Dynamics of Krause-Hegselmann
In the consensus model of Krause-Hegselmann, opinions are real numbers
between 0 and 1 and two agents are compatible if the difference of their
opinions is smaller than the confidence bound parameter \epsilon. A randomly
chosen agent takes the average of the opinions of all neighbouring agents which
are compatible with it. We propose a conjecture, based on numerical evidence,
on the value of the consensus threshold \epsilon_c of this model. We claim that
\epsilon_c can take only two possible values, depending on the behaviour of the
average degree d of the graph representing the social relationships, when the
population N goes to infinity: if d diverges when N goes to infinity,
\epsilon_c equals the consensus threshold \epsilon_i ~ 0.2 on the complete
graph; if instead d stays finite when N goes to infinity, \epsilon_c=1/2 as for
the model of Deffuant et al.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, to appear in International Journal of Modern
Physics C 16, issue 2 (2005
How friends and non-determinism affect opinion dynamics
The Hegselmann-Krause system (HK system for short) is one of the most popular
models for the dynamics of opinion formation in multiagent systems. Agents are
modeled as points in opinion space, and at every time step, each agent moves to
the mass center of all the agents within unit distance. The rate of convergence
of HK systems has been the subject of several recent works. In this work, we
investigate two natural variations of the HK system and their effect on the
dynamics. In the first variation, we only allow pairs of agents who are friends
in an underlying social network to communicate with each other. In the second
variation, agents may not move exactly to the mass center but somewhere close
to it. The dynamics of both variants are qualitatively very different from that
of the classical HK system. Nevertheless, we prove that both these systems
converge in polynomial number of non-trivial steps, regardless of the social
network in the first variant and noise patterns in the second variant.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure
Optimal control of the convergence time in the Hegselmann--Krause dynamics
We study the optimal control problem of minimizing the convergence time in
the discrete Hegselmann--Krause model of opinion dynamics. The underlying model
is extended with a set of strategic agents that can freely place their opinion
at every time step. Indeed, if suitably coordinated, the strategic agents can
significantly lower the convergence time of an instance of the
Hegselmann--Krause model. We give several lower and upper worst-case bounds for
the convergence time of a Hegselmann--Krause system with a given number of
strategic agents, while still leaving some gaps for future research.Comment: 14 page
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