SLOWER IS FASTER: FOSTERING CONSENSUS FORMATION BY HETEROGENEOUS INERTIA

Hans-Ulrich Stark (), Claudio J. Tessone and Frank Schweitzer
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Hans-Ulrich Stark: Chair of Systems Design, ETH Zurich, Kreuzplatz 5, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland
Claudio J. Tessone: Chair of Systems Design, ETH Zurich, Kreuzplatz 5, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland
Frank Schweitzer: Chair of Systems Design, ETH Zurich, Kreuzplatz 5, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland

Advances in Complex Systems (ACS), 2008, vol. 11, issue 04, pages 551-563

Abstract: We investigate an extension of the voter model in which voters are equipped with an individual inertia to change their opinion. This inertia depends on the persistence time of a voter's current opinion (ageing). We focus on the case of only two different inertia values: zero if a voter just changed toward a new opinion, and ν otherwise. We are interested in the average time to reach consensus, i.e. the state in which all voters have adopted the same opinion. Adding inertia to the system means to slow down the dynamics at the voter's level, which should presumably lead to slower consensus formation. As an unexpected outcome of our inertial voter dynamics, there is a parameter region of ν where an increasing inertia leads to faster consensus formation. These results rest on the heterogeneity of voters which evolves through the described ageing. In a control setting of homogeneous inertia values, we only find monotonously increasing consensus times. In this paper, we present dynamical equations for the mean field case which allow for analytical insight into the observed slower-is-faster effect.

Keywords: Voter model; heterogeneity; social inertia; consensus times (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008

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