Effect of leader's strategy on opinion formation in networked societies

Abstract

The work investigates the influence of leader's strategy on opinion formation in artificial networked societies. The strength of the social influence is assumed to be dictated by distance from one agent to another, as well as individual strengths of the agents. The leader is assumed to have much greater resources, which allows him to tune the way he influences the other agents. We study various strategies of using these resources to optimize the conditions needed to `convince' the whole society to leader's opinion. The flexibility of the model allows it to be used in studies of political, social and marketing influence and opinion formation.