Related papers: Better be third then second in a search for a majo…

A Monte Carlo simulation was used to determine which assumptions for ordered categorical data, continuity vs. discrete categories, most frequently identifies the underlying factor structure when a response variable has five ordered…

We study models of a society composed of a mixture of conformist and reasonable contrarian agents that at any instant hold one of two opinions. Conformists tend to agree with the average opinion of their neighbors and reasonable contrarians…

This work presents short-time Monte Carlo simulations for the two dimensional Majority-vote model starting from ordered and disordered states. It has been found that there are two pseudo-critical points, each one within the error-bar range…

Though deliberation is a critical component of democratic decision-making, existing deliberative processes do not scale to large groups of people. Motivated by this, we propose a model in which large-scale decision-making takes place…

We propose a new opinion dynamic model based on the experiments and results of Wood et al (1996). We consider pairs of individuals discussing on two attitudinal dimensions, and we suppose that one dimension is important, the other…

In the compromise model of continuous opinions proposed by Deffuant et al, the states of two agents in a network can start to converge if they are neighbors and if their opinions are sufficiently close to each other, below a given threshold…

The study of opinions $-$ e.g., their formation and change, and their effects on our society $-$ by means of theoretical and numerical models has been one of the main goals of sociophysics until now, but it is one of the defining topics…

In modern democracies, the outcome of elections and referendums is often remarkably tight. The repetition of these divisive events are the hallmark of a split society; to the physicist, however, it is an astonishing feat for such large…

We focus on non-consensus opinion models in which above a certain threshold two opinions coexist in a stable relationship. We revisit and extend the non-consensus opinion (NCO) model introduced by Shao. We generalize the NCO model by adding…

In the Monte Carlo (MC) method statistical noise is usually present. Statistical noise may become dominant in the calculation of a distribution, usually by iteration, but is less Important in calculating integrals. The subject of the…

This paper gives lower bounds for the probability of consensus for two spatially explicit stochastic opinion models. Both processes are characterized by two finite connected graphs, that we call respectively the spatial graph and the…

The Sznajd model is a sociophysics model that mimics the propagation of opinions in a closed society, where the interactions favour groups of agreeing people. It is based in the Ising and Potts ferromagnetic models and although the original…

Recently we discovered (cond-mat/0212043) that the majority of scientific citations are copied from the lists of references used in other papers. Here we show that a model, in which a scientist picks three random papers, cites them,and also…

The probability of a given candidate winning a future election is worked out in closed form as a function of (i) the current support rates for each candidate, (ii) the relative positioning of the candidates within the political spectrum,…

To conduct Bayesian inference with large data sets, it is often convenient or necessary to distribute the data across multiple machines. We consider a likelihood function expressed as a product of terms, each associated with a subset of the…

Opinion formation is an important element of social dynamics. It has been widely studied in the last years with tools from physics, mathematics and computer science. Here, a continuous model of opinion dynamics for multiple possible choices…

The problem of "approximating the crowd" is that of estimating the crowd's majority opinion by querying only a subset of it. Algorithms that approximate the crowd can intelligently stretch a limited budget for a crowdsourcing task. We…

We study the formation of public opinion in a poll process where the current score is open to public. The voters are assumed to vote probabilistically for or against their own preference considering the group opinion collected up to then in…

It is a well-known rule of thumb that approximations of stochastic partial differential equations have essentially twice the order of weak convergence compared to the corresponding order of strong convergence. This is already known for many…

A continuous-opinion model accounting for the social compromise propensity is theoretically and numerically analysed. An agent's opinion is represented by a real number that can be changed through social interactions with her neighbours.…