A general model of synchronous updating with binary opinions

Alexis Poindron (1, 2)

1 CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne
2 UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

We consider a society of agents making an iterated yes/no decision on some issue, where updating is done by mutual influence under a Markovian process. Agents update their opinions at the same time, independently of each other, in an entirely mechanical manner. They can have a favourable or an unfavourable perception of their neighbours. We study the qualitative patterns of this model, which captures several notions, including conformism, anti-conformism, communitarianism and leadership. We discuss under which conditions opinions are stable. Finally, we introduce a notion of entropy that we use to extract information on the society and to predict future opinions.

Mots clés: opinion dynamics; convergence; absorbing class; groups; entropy

Domaines: Economies et finances

Alexis Poindron. A general model of synchronous updating with binary opinions. 2019. ⟨halshs-02372486⟩