Impacts of an expert’s opinion on the collective performance of a competing population for limited resources

C. Xu, G.-Q. Gu and P.M. Hui

Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, 2024, vol. 183, issue C

Abstract: The dissemination of information and opinion to the public has never been easier due to the easy access to platforms, making it necessary to study the responses to public information by a competing population. We study the impact of an expert’s opinion on the performance of a population including some die-hard fans of the expert and cautious agents who will adapt to trust or to ignore the expert’s opinion, within the framework of the minority game (MG). The expert collects information by probing a subpopulation for its minority opinion without the knowledge of its composition. When the information is not disseminated, the expert’s opinion has a higher accuracy than the intrinsic success rate of the population. When the information is disseminated, the population could enhance its success rate by making use of the wasted winning quotas through the actions of the fans and the adaptive ability of the cautious agents, as long as the fraction of the fans is not too big to turn the expert’s opinion into the losing option. There exists an optimal fraction of followers, the fans plus those cautious agents adapted to trust the expert, for the population to be the most harmonious with the highest success rate allowed by MG. The phenomena observed by numerical simulations motivated us to develop a theory, using the intrinsic success rate SrI, a quantity related to how the expert collects his information, and the average adapted level of trust f¯ among the cautious agents as inputs. The theory gives excellent agreement with simulation results, even when an approximated form of f¯ is invoked. The work paves the way for studying and formulating theories for the dissemination of other forms of information and opinion.

Keywords: Information dissemination; Minority game; Expert’s opinion; Adaptive population; Collective behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960077924004570
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chsofr:v:183:y:2024:i:c:s0960077924004570

DOI: 10.1016/j.chaos.2024.114905

Access Statistics for this article

Chaos, Solitons & Fractals is currently edited by Stefano Boccaletti and Stelios Bekiros

More articles in Chaos, Solitons & Fractals from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Thayer, Thomas R. ().