Collective Decision Dynamics in the Presence of External Drivers

We develop a sequence of models describing information transmission and decision dynamics for a network of individual agents subject to multiple sources of influence. Our general framework is set in the context of an impending natural disaster, where individuals, represented by nodes on the network, must decide whether or not to evacuate. Sources of influence include a one-to-many externally driven global broadcast as well as pairwise interactions, across links in the network, in which agents transmit either continuous opinions or binary actions. We consider both uniform and variable threshold rules on the individual opinion as baseline models for decision-making. Our results indicate that 1) social networks lead to clustering and cohesive action among individuals, 2) binary information introduces high temporal variability and stagnation, and 3) information transmission over the network can either facilitate or hinder action adoption, depending on the influence of the global broadcast relative to the social network. Our framework highlights the essential role of local interactions between agents in predicting collective behavior of the population as a whole.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure

Scale-free interpersonal influences on opinions in complex systems

An important side effect of the evolution of the human brain is an increased capacity to form opinions in a very large domain of issues, which become points of aggressive interpersonal disputes. Remarkably, such disputes are often no less vigorous on small differences of opinion than large differences. Opinion differences that may be measured on the real number line may not directly correspond to the subjective importance of an issue and extent of resistance to opinion change. This is a hard problem for field of opinion dynamics, a field that has become increasingly prominent as it has attracted more contributions to it from investigators in the natural and engineering sciences. The paper contributes a scale-free approach to assessing the extents to which individuals, with unknown heterogeneous resistances to influence, have been influenced by the opinions of others

Media Ownership Control: To What Extent Is Competition Law And Policy Sufficient to Provide for Diversity and Plurality in the Media?

In modern economies and societies, the availability of information is central to better decision making by citizens and consumers. In most countries, citizens and consumers receive the information they need through the media, including newspapers, television radio, internet and etc. After 1990s, technological and economic developments have evolved the media sector by converging it to telecommunications and IT sectors and by leading to new interactive broadcasting services transmitted by different technologies. These developments also increased mergers and joint ventures both at global level and national level. As well as these developments, the private benefits of media have increased concentration of ownership in these sectors. There are many people who argue that concentration in media markets has a negative effect on diversity and plurality. Because of increasing concentration in media markets in recent years all over the world, many concerns as to whether competition law and policy is sufficient to ensure the diversity and pluralism in media have arisen. Competition rules can address issues of concentration, efficiency and choice and will tend to encourage dispersed ownership and new entry. However, they cannot guarantee any of it. Competition law cannot therefore provide the certainty we need that a significant number of different media voices will continue to be heard, or that prospective new entrants to the market will be able to add their voice. Moreover, it cannot directly address concerns over editorial freedom or community voice. Therefore, if competition law and policy is assessed as a whole in the context of media, it can be stated that it guarantees diversity to some extent. However, because of the objectives and criteria of competition law is an important part of regulation, it is not designed to deliver diversity and plurality in the media. Special media ownership rules exist across the world because the market alone, even regulated by competition law, is not thought to provide the best results for society and for democracy.

Governance in Social Media: A case study of the Wikipedia promotion process

Social media sites are often guided by a core group of committed users engaged in various forms of governance. A crucial aspect of this type of governance is deliberation, in which such a group reaches decisions on issues of importance to the site. Despite its crucial --- though subtle --- role in how a number of prominent social media sites function, there has been relatively little investigation of the deliberative aspects of social media governance. Here we explore this issue, investigating a particular deliberative process that is extensive, public, and recorded: the promotion of Wikipedia admins, which is determined by elections that engage committed members of the Wikipedia community. We find that the group decision-making at the heart of this process exhibits several fundamental forms of relative assessment. First we observe that the chance that a voter will support a candidate is strongly dependent on the relationship between characteristics of the voter and the candidate. Second we investigate how both individual voter decisions and overall election outcomes can be based on models that take into account the sequential, public nature of the voting

Opinion Formation Threshold Estimates from Different Combinations of Social Media Data-Types

Passive consumption of a quantifiable amount of social media information related to a topic can cause individuals to form opinions. If a substantial amount of these individuals are motivated to take action from their recently established opinions, a movement or public opinion shift can be induced independent of the information’s veracity. Given that social media is ubiquitous in modern society, it is imperative that we understand the threshold at which social media data results in opinion formation. The present study estimates population opinion formation thresholds by querying 2222 participants about the number of various social media data-types (i.e., images, videos, and/or messages) that they would need to passively consume to form opinions. Opinion formation is assessed across three dimensions, 1) data-type(s), 2) context, 3) and source. This work provides a theoretical basis for estimating the amount of data needed to influence a population through social media information

A model for cross-cultural reciprocal interactions through mass media

We investigate the problem of cross-cultural interactions through mass media in a model where two populations of social agents, each with its own internal dynamics, get information about each other through reciprocal global interactions. As the agent dynamics, we employ Axelrod's model for social influence. The global interaction fields correspond to the statistical mode of the states of the agents and represent mass media messages on the cultural trend originating in each population. Several phases are found in the collective behavior of either population depending on parameter values: two homogeneous phases, one having the state of the global field acting on that population, and the other consisting of a state different from that reached by the applied global field; and a disordered phase. In addition, the system displays nontrivial effects: (i) the emergence of a largest minority group of appreciable size sharing a state different from that of the applied global field; (ii) the appearance of localized ordered states for some values of parameters when the entire system is observed, consisting of one population in a homogeneous state and the other in a disordered state. This last situation can be considered as a social analogue to a chimera state arising in globally coupled populations of oscillators.Comment: 8 pages and 7 figure