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Artificial Intelligence and Law
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Opinion Dynamics with Median Aggregation

Authors: Petra Berenbrink; Martin Hoefer; Dominik Kaaser; Marten Maack; Malin Rau; Lisa Wilhelmi;

Opinion Dynamics with Median Aggregation

Abstract

Understanding the formation and evolution of opinions is of broad interdisciplinary interest. Many classical models for opinion formation focus on the impact of different notions of locality, e.g., locality due to network effects among agents or the role of the proximity of opinions. In practice, however, opinion formation is often governed by the interplay of local and global influences. In this paper, we study an asynchronous opinion dynamics in a social network. Each agent has a static intrinsic opinion as well as a public opinion that is updated asynchronously over time. Moreover, agents have access to a global aggregate (e.g., the outcome of a vote) of all public opinions. We focus on the popular median voting rule and show that pure Nash equilibria always exist. For every initial state of the dynamics, a pure equilibrium can be reached. The set of reachable equilibria forms a complete lattice, and extremal equilibria can be computed in polynomial time. Indeed, there are instances and initial states from which the number of reachable equilibria is exponentially large. The global median in these equilibria can be any of the initial opinions. We show that by uniformly increasing the influence of the aggregate median we can enforce that the median opinion is the same in every reachable equilibrium. We can compute the increase scheme that achieves this property in polynomial time. Furthermore, we show that finding the k most influential agents is NP-complete.

Country
Germany
Keywords

Opinion Formation, Opinion formation, Median Voting, Median voting, Nash equilibrium, Nash Equilibria

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selected citations
These citations are derived from selected sources.
This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Citations provided by BIP!
popularity
This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Popularity provided by BIP!
influence
This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically).
BIP!Influence provided by BIP!
impulse
This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network.
BIP!Impulse provided by BIP!
0
Average
Average
Average
Green
hybrid