Related papers: The first shall be last: selection-driven minority…
Strongly opinionated minorities can have a dramatic impact on the opinion dynamics of a large population. Two factions of inflexible minorities, polarised into two competing opinions, could lead the entire population to persistent…
Modelling efforts in opinion dynamics have to a large extent ignored that opinion exchange between individuals can also have an effect on how willing they are to express their opinion publicly. Here, we introduce a model of public opinion…
Here we focus on the description of the mechanisms behind the process of information aggregation and decision making, a basic step to understand emergent phenomena in society, such as trends, information spreading or the wisdom of crowds.…
One of the fundamental principles driving diversity or homogeneity in domains such as cultural differentiation, political affiliation, and product adoption is the tension between two forces: influence (the tendency of people to become…
We briefly introduce a new promising field of applications of statistical physics, opinion dynamics, where the systems at study are social groups or communities and the atoms/spins are the individuals (or agents) belonging to such groups.…
In this paper, we study how an agent's belief is affected by her neighbors in a social network. We first introduce a general framework, where every agent has an initial belief on a statement, and updates her belief according to her and her…
How often will elections end in landslides? What is the probability for a head-to-head race? Analyzing ballot results from several large countries rather anomalous and yet unexplained distributions have been observed. We identify tactical…
We consider a group of agents connected by a social network who participate in majority dynamics: each agent starts with an opinion in {-1,+1} and repeatedly updates it to match the opinion of the majority of its neighbors. We assume that…
Non-linear voter models assume that the opinion of an agent depends on the opinions of its neighbors in a non-linear manner. This allows for voting rules different from majority voting. While the linear voter model is known to reach…
We consider an agent community wishing to decide on several binary issues by means of issue-by-issue majority voting. For each issue and each agent, one of the two options is better than the other. However, some of the agents may be…
We investigate the collective behavior of a system of social agents subject to the competition between two mass media influences considered as external fields. We study under what conditions either of two mass media with different…
When two pedestrians travelling in opposite directions approach one another, each must decide on which side (the left or the right) they will attempt to pass. If both make the same choice then passing can be completed with ease, while if…
The statistical properties of pairwise majority voting over S alternatives is analyzed in an infinite random population. We first compute the probability that the majority is transitive (i.e. that if it prefers A to B to C, then it prefers…
We present a model that explores the influence of persuasion in a population of agents with positive and negative opinion orientations. The opinion of each agent is represented by an integer number $k$ that expresses its level of agreement…
How does temporally structured private and social information shape collective decisions? To address this question we consider a network of rational agents who independently accumulate private evidence that triggers a decision upon reaching…
We design two mechanisms that ensure that the majority preferred option wins in all equilibria. The first one is a simultaneous game where agents choose other agents to cooperate with on top of the vote for an alternative, thus overcoming…
A current paradigm in computer simulation studies of social sciences problems by physicists is the emergence of consensus. The question is to establish when the dynamics of a set of interacting agents that can choose among several options…
Social scientists have long sought to understand why certain people, items, or options become more popular than others. One seemingly intuitive theory is that inherent value drives popularity. An alternative theory claims that popularity is…
We introduce a new agent-based model of opinion dynamics in which binary opinions (yes/no) of each agent can be measured and described regarding both pre- and post-influence at both of two levels, public and private, vis-\`a-vis the…
The Majority Rule is applied to a topology that consists of two coupled random networks, thereby mimicking the modular structure observed in social networks. We calculate analytically the asymptotic behaviour of the model and derive a phase…