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The role of committed minorities in shaping public opinion has been recently addressed with the help of multi-agent models. However, previous studies focused on homogeneous populations where zealots stand out only for their stubbornness.…
People are influenced by the choices of others, a phenomenon observed across contexts in the social and behavioral sciences. Social influence can lock in an initial popularity advantage of an option over a higher quality alternative. Yet…
We present numerical simulations of a model of social influence, where the opinion of each agent is represented by a binary vector. Agents adjust their opinions as a result of random encounters, whenever the difference between opinions is…
Population protocols are a model of distributed computing where $n$ agents, each a simple finite-state machine, interact in pairs to solve a common task against a (adversarial) interaction scheduler. This model was intensively studied in…
In this work we study the opinion evolution in a community-based population with intergroup interactions. We address two issues. First, we consider that such intergroup interactions can be negative with some probability $p$. We develop a…
The proportional elections held in Brazil in 1998 and 2002 display identical statistical signatures. In particular, the distribution of votes among candidates includes a power-law regimen. We suggest that the rationale behind this robust…
In finding the adequate way to prioritize proposals, the Brazilian participation community agreed about the measurement of two indexes, one of approval and one of participation. Both practice and literature is constantly handled by the…
A voter sits on each vertex of an infinite tree of degree $k$, and has to decide between two alternative opinions. At each time step, each voter switches to the opinion of the majority of her neighbors. We analyze this majority process when…
We study information aggregation in networks when agents interact to learn a binary state of the world. Initially each agent privately observes an independent signal which is "correct" with probability $\frac{1}{2}+\delta$ for some $\delta…
We performed a massive study of the dynamics of group deliberation among several websites containing millions of opinions on topics ranging from books to media. Contrary to the common phenomenon of group polarization observed offline, we…
We investigate a variation of the classical voter model in which the set of influencing agents depends on an individual's current opinion. The initial population consists of a random sample of equally sized sub-populations for each state,…
We analyze Assessment Voting, a new two-round voting procedure that can be applied to binary decisions in democratic societies. In the first round, a randomly-selected number of citizens cast their vote on one of the two alternatives at…
A two state model for opinion forming, which has proven heuristic power, is reviewed with a novel emphasis on the existence or absence of a threshold for the dynamics. Monitored by repeated small groups discussions floater agents update…
Social networks are increasingly being used to conduct polls. We introduce a simple model of such social polling. We suppose agents vote sequentially, but the order in which agents choose to vote is not necessarily fixed. We also suppose…
Confirmation bias and peer pressure both have substantial impacts on the formation of collective decisions. Nevertheless, few attempts have been made to study how the interplay between these two mechanisms affects public opinion evolution.…
We analyze the accuracy of collective decision-making in socially connected populations, where agents update binary choices through local interactions on a network. Each agent receives a private signal that is biased -- even marginally --…
We investigate the role of opinion leaders or influentials in the collective behavior of a social system. Opinion leaders are characterized by their unidirectional influence on other agents. We employ a model based on Axelrod's dynamics for…
The paper studies the problem of steering multi-dimensional opinion in a social network. Assuming the society of desire consists of stubborn and regular agents, stubborn agents are considered as leaders who specify the desired opinion…
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…
Recent empirical findings suggest that societies have become more polarized in various countries. That is, the median voter of today represents a smaller fraction of society compared to two decades ago and yet, the mechanisms underlying…