Maximising the Influence of Temporary Participants in Opinion Formation

Abstract

DeGroot-style opinion formation presumes a continuous interaction among agents of a social network. Hence, it cannot handle agents external to the social network that interact only temporarily with the permanent ones. Many real-world organisations and individuals fall into such a category. For instance, a company tries to persuade as many as possible to buy its products and, due to various constraints, can only exert its influence for a limited amount of time. We propose a variant of the DeGroot model that allows an external agent to interact with the permanent ones for a preset period of time. We obtain several insights on maximising an external agent's influence in opinion formation by analysing and simulating the variant.