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Timo Vilkas

Senior lecturer

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Overly determined agents prevent consensus in a generalized Deffuant model on with dispersed opinions

Author

  • Timo Hirscher

Summary, in English

During the last decades, quite a number of interacting particle systems have been introduced and studied in the crossover area of mathematics and statistical physics. Some of these can be seen as simplistic models for opinion formation processes in groups of interacting people. In the model introduced by Deffuant et al. (2000), agents that are neighbors on a given network graph, randomly meet in pairs and approach a compromise if their current opinions do not differ by more than a given threshold value θ. We consider the two-sided infinite path as the underlying graph and extend existing models to a setting in which opinions are given by probability distributions. Similar to what has been shown for finite-dimensional opinions, we observe a dichotomy in the long-term behavior of the model, but only if the initial narrow mindedness of the agents is restricted.

Publishing year

2017-09-01

Language

English

Pages

722-744

Publication/Series

Advances in Applied Probability

Volume

49

Issue

3

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Applied Probability Trust

Topic

  • Probability Theory and Statistics

Keywords

  • Deffuant model
  • opinion dynamics
  • random measure
  • total variation distance

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0001-8678