English

Graph-Theoretic Analysis of Belief System Dynamics under Logic Constraints

Optimization and Control 2019-01-01 v2 Computers and Society Multiagent Systems Social and Information Networks Applications

Abstract

Opinion formation cannot be modeled solely as an ideological deduction from a set of principles; rather, repeated social interactions and logic constraints among statements are consequential in the construct of belief systems. We address three basic questions in the analysis of social opinion dynamics: (i) Will a belief system converge? (ii) How long does it take to converge? (iii) Where does it converge? We provide graph-theoretic answers to these questions for a model of opinion dynamics of a belief system with logic constraints. Our results make plain the implicit dependence of the convergence properties of a belief system on the underlying social network and on the set of logic constraints that relate beliefs on different statements. Moreover, we provide an explicit analysis of a variety of commonly used large-scale network models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1810.02456,
  title  = {Graph-Theoretic Analysis of Belief System Dynamics under Logic Constraints},
  author = {Angelia Nedić and Alex Olshevsky and César A. Uribe},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.02456},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T04:29:05.593Z