Measuring Power and Satisfaction in Societies with Opinion Leaders: Dictator and Opinion Leader Properties

Rene van den Brink (), Agnieszka Rusinowska and Frank Steffen
Additional contact information
Frank Steffen: The University of Liverpool - Management School (ULMS)

No 09-052/1, Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute

Abstract: See also the publication in 'Social Choice and Welfare', 2013, 41, 671-683.

A well known and established model in communication policy in sociology and marketing is that of opinion leadership. Opinion leaders are actors in a society who are able to affect the behavior of other members called followers. Hence, opinion leaders might have a considerable impact on the behavior of markets and other social agglomerations being made up of individual actors choosing among different alternatives. For marketing or policy purposes it is interesting to investigate the effect of different opinion leader-follower structures in markets or other collective decision-making situations in a society. We study a two-action model in which the members of a society are to choose one action, for instance, to buy or not to buy a certain joint product, or to vote yes or no on a specific proposal. Each of the actors has an inclination to choose one of the actions. By definition opinion leaders have some power over their followers, and they exercise this power by influencing the behavior of their followers, i.e. their choice of action. After all actors have chosen their actions, a decision-making mechanism determines the collective choice resulting from the individual choices. Using bipartite digraphs we introduce satisfaction and power scores which allow us to analyze the actors' satisfaction and power with respect to the collective choice for societies with different opinion leader-follower structures. Moreover, we study common dictator and opinion leader properties of the above scores and illustrate our findings for a society with five members.

Keywords: Bipartite digraph; influence; inclination; collective choice; opinion leader; follower; satisfaction; power; dictator properties; opinion leader properties (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C7 D7 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-06-11
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://papers.tinbergen.nl/09052.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Measuring Power and Satisfaction in Societies with Opinion Leaders: Dictator and Opinion Leader Properties (2011)
Working Paper: Measuring Power and Satisfaction in Societies with Opinion Leaders: Dictator and Opinion Leader Properties (2011)
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:tin:wpaper:20090052

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers from Tinbergen Institute Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tinbergen Office +31 (0)10-4088900 ().