Articles

CONSENSUS FORMATION OF TWO-LEVEL OPINION DYNAMICS

  • Yilun SHANG
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  • SUTD-MIT International Design Center, Singapore University of Technology and Design, 20 Dover Drive, 138682, Singapore

Received date: 2013-06-24

  Revised date: 2013-10-01

  Online published: 2014-07-20

Supported by

This research was partially supported by a SUTD-MIT IDC Grant.

Abstract

Opinion dynamics have received significant attention in recent years. This pa-per proposes a bounded confidence opinion model for a group of agents with two different confidence levels. Each agent in the population is endowed with a confidence interval around her opinion with radius αd or (1 − α)d, where α∈ (0, 1/2] represents the differentiation of
confidence levels. We analytically derived the critical confidence bound dc = 1/(4α) for the two-level opinion dynamics on Z. A single opinion cluster is formed with probability 1 above this critical value regardless of the ratio p of agents with high/low confidence. Extensive numerical simulations are performed to illustrate our theoretical results. Noticed is a clear impact of p on the collective behavior: more agents with high confidence lead to harder agreement. It is also experimentally revealed that the sharpness of the threshold dc increases with α but does not depend on p.

Cite this article

Yilun SHANG . CONSENSUS FORMATION OF TWO-LEVEL OPINION DYNAMICS[J]. Acta mathematica scientia, Series B, 2014 , 34(4) : 1029 -1040 . DOI: 10.1016/S0252-9602(14)60067-9

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