Containment Control Approach for Steering Opinion in a Social Network

Abstract

The paper studies the problem of steering multi-dimensional opinion in a social network. Assuming the society of desire consists of stubborn and regular agents, stubborn agents are considered as leaders who specify the desired opinion distribution as a distributed reward or utility function. In this context, each regular agent is seen as a follower, updating its bias on the initial opinion and influence weights by averaging their observations of the rewards their influencers have received. Assuming random graphs with reducible and irreducible topology specify the influences on regular agents, opinion evolution is represented as a containment control problem in which stability and convergence to the final opinion are proven.