TY - JOUR
T1 - Influence of conformist and manipulative behaviors on public opinion
AU - Etesami, S. Rasoul
AU - Bolouki, Sadegh
AU - Nedic, Angelia
AU - Basar, Tamer
AU - Poor, H. Vincent
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received October 24, 2017; accepted February 8, 2018. Date of publication February 14, 2018; date of current version March 14, 2019.This work was supported in part by the ARO Grant W911NF-16-1-0485, in part by the ONR MURI Grant N00014-16-1-2710 and Grant N00014-12-1-0998, and in part by the National Science Foundation Grant ECCS-1549881. Recommended by Associate Editor F. Fagnani. (Corresponding author: S. Rasoul Etesami.) S. R. Etesami is with the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61801 USA (e-mail: etesami1@illinois.edu).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 IEEE.
PY - 2019/3
Y1 - 2019/3
N2 - A discrete-time dynamical opinion network is considered in which individuals express their opinions, modeled by scalars, about a certain subject. The reputation (rating) of the subject, herein also referred to as the public opinion, is defined as the arithmetic mean of the expressed opinions. It is assumed that the expressed opinion of an individual may differ from her actual belief due to two main opposing social behaviors, namely, conformity and manipulation. For the purposes of this paper, conformity refers to the tendency of an individual to express an opinion that matches the public opinion, whereas manipulation refers to the tendency of an individual to express an opinion in order to manipulate the public opinion toward her actual belief. The general goal is to investigate how public opinion evolves in the presence of these behaviors via a game-theoretic approach. Several single- and multistage games are introduced to address different relevant scenarios. In all games, the actual beliefs are modeled by scalars in the interval [0,1]. However, the games are organized into two classes, according to the nature of the expressed opinions that represent the players' actions: 1) binary, that is, the action set of each player is the set 0,1, in which case the opinion network resembles a tracking opinion poll, and 2) continuous, that is, the action sets are the interval [0,1], which better captures realistic opinion dynamics in social networks. For each game, the evolution of the subject's reputation as time grows is investigated.
AB - A discrete-time dynamical opinion network is considered in which individuals express their opinions, modeled by scalars, about a certain subject. The reputation (rating) of the subject, herein also referred to as the public opinion, is defined as the arithmetic mean of the expressed opinions. It is assumed that the expressed opinion of an individual may differ from her actual belief due to two main opposing social behaviors, namely, conformity and manipulation. For the purposes of this paper, conformity refers to the tendency of an individual to express an opinion that matches the public opinion, whereas manipulation refers to the tendency of an individual to express an opinion in order to manipulate the public opinion toward her actual belief. The general goal is to investigate how public opinion evolves in the presence of these behaviors via a game-theoretic approach. Several single- and multistage games are introduced to address different relevant scenarios. In all games, the actual beliefs are modeled by scalars in the interval [0,1]. However, the games are organized into two classes, according to the nature of the expressed opinions that represent the players' actions: 1) binary, that is, the action set of each player is the set 0,1, in which case the opinion network resembles a tracking opinion poll, and 2) continuous, that is, the action sets are the interval [0,1], which better captures realistic opinion dynamics in social networks. For each game, the evolution of the subject's reputation as time grows is investigated.
KW - Actual opinion
KW - Nash equilibrium
KW - conformity
KW - game theory
KW - manipulation
KW - opinion dynamics
KW - virtual opinion
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U2 - 10.1109/TCNS.2018.2806179
DO - 10.1109/TCNS.2018.2806179
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85042133327
SN - 2325-5870
VL - 6
SP - 202
EP - 214
JO - IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems
JF - IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems
IS - 1
M1 - 8291583
ER -