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Stability in Binary Opinion Diffusion

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Logic, Rationality, and Interaction (LORI 2017)

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Abstract

The paper studies the stabilization of the process of diffusion of binary opinions on networks. It first shows how such dynamics can be modeled and studied via techniques from binary aggregation, which directly relate to neighborhood frames. It then characterizes stabilization in terms of such neighborhood structures, and shows how the monotone \(\mu \)-calculus can express relevant properties of them. Finally, it illustrates the scope of these results by applying them to specific diffusion models.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Formally, an aggregator F is independent iff, for all \(p\in \mathbf{P}\): for any profiles \(\mathbf{O}, \mathbf{O}'\) such that for all \(i\in N, O_i(p) = O'_i(p)\), \(F(\mathbf{O})(p)=F(\mathbf{O}')(p)\). Independence is a natural assumption in settings like ours, where issues are assumed not to be logically interrelated.

  2. 2.

    Recall that the ceiling function \(\lceil x \rceil \) denotes the smallest integer larger than x.

  3. 3.

    More precisely, \(\mathbf{F}: N \rightarrow \left( \mathbf{P}\rightarrow \bigcup _{X \subseteq N} \left\{ \mathbf{0}, \mathbf{1} \right\} ^{\left\{ \mathbf{0},\mathbf{1} \right\} ^{|X|}} \right) \).

  4. 4.

    It is worth noticing that \(\mathbf{F}(i)\) is not an aggregator in the strict sense, as the set of individuals whose opinions are aggregated varies from issue to issue. However, it can be represented by an aggregator on N where \(N \backslash R_p(i)\) are dummy agents, as shown later in Lemma 1. We will therefore slightly abuse terminology and still refer to such functions as aggregators.

  5. 5.

    Note that the construction in the proof of Lemma 1 is such that each agent \(j \not \in R_p(i)\) participates to i’s set of winning and veto coalitions only as a ‘dummy’ agent who can be added or removed to a winning (or veto) coalition without changing the status of that coalition.

  6. 6.

    Note that \(\{a,b\}\) and \(\emptyset \) are consensuses.

  7. 7.

    The monotone \(\mu \)-calculus was already used in [3] to model threshold-based diffusion.

  8. 8.

    These properties force the resulting class of structures to validate specific formulae expressed in the above language. We refer the reader to [21] for an overview of the logics induced by monotonic neighborhood structures and subclasses thereof.

  9. 9.

    We alternatively write \(\mathcal {M}, i \models \varphi \) whenever \( i\in ||\varphi ||\).

  10. 10.

    Note that this dynamics is the extreme case of linear averaging applied on binary opinions and binary influence.

  11. 11.

    BDPs are also limit cases of propositional opinion diffusion processes recently proposed by [18], i.e., cases where (1) the aggregation rule is the unanimity rule (an agent changes its opinion if and only if all her influencers disagree with it), and (2) each agent has exactly one influencer. Note that, in general, the ‘unanimity rule’ from the setting of propositional opinion diffusion differs from what we call the unanimity rule, which prescribes not only to ‘change’ your opinion if all your influencers have the opposite opinion, but to adopt their opinion no matter what opinion you currently hold. In the limit case of BDPs, those two notions trivially coincide.

  12. 12.

    These correspond to the typical case of ‘friendship’ networks (cf. [23]).

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Acknowledgments

Zoé Christoff and Davide Grossi acknowledge support for this research by EPSRC (grant EP/M015815/1, “Foundations of Opinion Formation in Autonomous Systems”). Zoé Christoff also acknowledges support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and Grantová agentura České republiky (GAČR) joint project RO 4548/6–1.

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Christoff, Z., Grossi, D. (2017). Stability in Binary Opinion Diffusion. In: Baltag, A., Seligman, J., Yamada, T. (eds) Logic, Rationality, and Interaction. LORI 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10455. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-55665-8_12

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