Damage spreading and opinion dynamics on scale-free networks

Santo Fortunato

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2005, vol. 348, issue C, 683-690

Abstract: We study damage spreading among the opinions of a system of agents, subjected to the dynamics of the Krause–Hegselmann consensus model. The damage consists in a sharp change of the opinion of one or more agents in the initial random opinion configuration, supposedly due to some external factors and/or events. This may help to understand for instance under which conditions special shocking events or targeted propaganda are able to influence the results of elections. For agents lying on the nodes of a Barabási–Albert network, there is a damage spreading transition at a low value εd of the confidence bound parameter. Interestingly, we find as well that there is some critical value εs above which the initial perturbation manages to propagate to all other agents.

Keywords: Networks; Damage spreading; Sociophysics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437104012257
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

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:phsmap:v:348:y:2005:i:c:p:683-690

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2004.09.007

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().