 Opinion dynamics and wisdom under out-group discriminationSteffen Eger Mathematical Social Sciences, 2016, vol. 80, issue C, 97-107 Abstract: We study a DeGroot-like opinion dynamics model in which agents may oppose other agents. As an underlying motivation, in our setup, agents want to adjust their opinions to match those of the agents of their ‘in-group’ and, in addition, they want to adjust their opinions to match the ‘inverse’ of those of the agents of their ‘out-group’. Our paradigm can account for persistent disagreement in connected societies as well as bi- and multi-polarization. Outcomes depend upon network structure and the choice of deviation function modeling the mode of opposition between agents. For a particular choice of deviation function, which we call soft opposition, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for long-run polarization. We also consider social influence (who are the opinion leaders in the network?) as well as the question of wisdom in our naïve learning paradigm, finding that wisdom is difficult to attain when there exist sufficiently strong negative relations between agents.11Earlier and more verbose working paper versions of this article can be found at http://arxiv.org/pdf/1306.3134 and the author’s personal website. Date: 2016 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:matsoc:v:80:y:2016:i:c:p:97-107 DOI: 10.1016/j.mathsocsci.2016.02.005 Access Statistics for this article Mathematical Social Sciences is currently edited by J.-F. Laslier More articles in Mathematical Social Sciences from Elsevier |
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