Opinion dynamics for agents with opinion-dependent connections
Author(s)
Tsitsiklis, John N.; Hendrickx, Julien; Blondel, Vincent D.
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We study a simple continuous-time multi-agent system related to Krause's model of opinion dynamics: each agent holds a real value, and this value is continuously attracted by every other value differing from it by less than 1, with an intensity proportional to the difference. We prove convergence to a set of clusters, with the agents in each cluster sharing a common value, and provide a lower bound on the distance between clusters at a stable equilibrium, under a suitable notion of multi-agent system stability. To better understand the behavior of the system for a large number of agents, we introduce a variant involving a continuum of agents. We show, under some conditions, the existence of a solution to the system dynamics, convergence to clusters, and a non-trivial lower bound on the distance between clusters. Finally, we establish that the continuum model accurately represents the asymptotic behavior of a system with a finite but large number of agents.
Date issued
2011-02Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer ScienceJournal
Proceedings of the 49th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2010
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Citation
Tsitsiklis, John N. et al. "Opinion dynamics for agents with opinion-dependent connections." Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC): 6626-6632. © 2010 IEEE.
Version: Final published version
ISBN
978-1-4244-7745-6
ISSN
0743-1546